THREE LECTURES 
ON THE © 


SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE 


F. MAK MULLER 


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Hrom the Library of 
Professor Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield 
Benueathed by him to 
the Library of 


Princeton Chealogical Seminary 
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M947 : 


THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE 


BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 


TurREeE INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF 
Tuoucut. With a correspondence on ‘' Thought 
Without Words,” between F. Max Miiller and 
Francis Galton, the Duke of Argyll, George J. Ro- 
manes, and others. Pages, 128. Cloth, 75 cents; 
paper, 25 cents. 


THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY. 
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f. 

A 
THREE LECTURES| 

\ 


\ 


ON THE 


SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE 


DELIVERED AT THE 
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BY 


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F. MAX MULLER 


SECOND EDITION 


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PABIGH OFSCON TENTS. 


PAGE 
First Lecture.—Man and Animal.—No Mystery in Language. 1 


Second Lecture.—The Analysis of Language.—The Lesson 
Taught by the Science of Language =. . . . . - . 25 

Third Lecture.—Thought Thicker than Blood.—The Cradle 
OfthevAryasian ste es ae Comes rer Gen Meron oee Visas 4S 


WR Ieee 5 GG ho oO 8B Oe & oO 6 6 6 o 6 


PUR Seer Cha hh: 


MAN AND ANIMAL. 


HERE seems to be some truth after all in the old 
English saying that familiarity breeds contempt, 
or, at all events, indifference. 

There is nothing we are more familiar with than 
our own language. We learn it, we hardly know how. 
While reading, writing, arithmetic, and all the rest, 
are not acquired without considerable effort, and are 
often forgotten again in later life, we learn our most 
difficult lesson, namely, speaking, without any con- 
scious effort, and, however old we may grow, we never 
forget it again. 

But I ask you, Have you ever tried to find out what 
this language of ours really is; how it came to us; 
when and where it was made; and what it was made of? 

Of course, you will all say, we learnt our language 
from our father and mother or rather from our mother 
and father. Yes, but from whom did they learn it? 
From their parents, and these parents again from 
their parents, and thus ad infinitum. 

Even this simple answer, which is by no means 
quite correct, is full of import, and ought to have been 
taken to heart far more seriously than it seems to have 


2 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


been by certain philosophers who maintain that parrots 
and other animals also learn to speak, exactly as chil- 
dren learn to speak, and that therefore language is 
after all nothing so very wonderful, and cannot be said 
to form an impassable barrier between man and beast. 
It is quite true that children now-a-days do neither 
create their own language nor inherit it. Speaking 
any given language is not an acquired habit that de- 
scends from father to son. The necessary conditions 
of speech, however, exist in man and in man only; 
for if these necessary conditions were present in the 
parrot as well as in man, it would indeed be strange, 
to say no more, that there should never have been a 
Parrotese language, and that no parrot should ever 
have learnt his language from his parents, and they 
from theirs, and thus ad infinitum. A parrot never 
learns to speak, as little as a child would ever learn to 
fly. These facts are so simple and so obvious that it 
is difficult to understand, how they can ever have been 
disregarded by philosophers. And yet to the present 
day, most thoughtful writers go on repeating the old 
fallacy, that a parrot learns to say ‘‘poor Polly,” just 
as a child learns to say ‘‘ poor Polly.” 

To put it on the lowest ground, do these philoso- 
phers not see that every child of man is the descend- 
ant of an animal that cow/d frame language, and fas 
framed language; while every parrot, and every other 
animal is the descendant of an animal that never 
framed a language of its own? When a parrot learns 
to speak, it is simply tempted to utter certain sounds, 
in more or less close imitation of English or French, 
by such rewards as sugar and other sweetmeats, or by 
severe punishments on the part of its keepers. As to 
any parrot inventing a language of its own, and teach- 


FIRST LECTURE. 3 


ing that language to its young, not even Mr. Romanes 
would believe in such a miracle. 

It is therefore not enough to say that we learn our 
language from our parents, and they from their par- 
ents, and thus ad infinitum. That would be a very 
lazy way of handling our problem. This retrogression 
ad infinitum would be a mere confession of ignorance, 
and such a confession, though it is very honorable 
when we know that we cannot know, cannot be tol- 
erated except in cases where we know also why we can- 
not know. 

When we see the history, or, as it is now the 
fashion to call it, the evolution of language, we can- 
not help admitting that there must have been some 
kind of beginning. A language, such as English, for 
instance, does not tumble down from the sky; and, 
even if it did, it would have to be picked up, and to 
pick up a language, as you know, is not a very easy 
task, particularly for a person supposed to be dumb 
and without any idea of what language is meant for. In 
former times, as it seemed to be impossible to account 
for language as a piece of human workmanship, it was 
readily admitted that it was of divine workmanship, 
that it really had tumbled down from the sky in some 
way or other, and that, curiously enough, man alone 
of all animals then living upon earth had been able to 
pick it up. 

But when languages began to be more carefully 
examined, traces of human workmanship became 
more and more visible, and at last the question could 
no longer be pushed aside, how language was made, 
and why man alone of all living beings should have 
come into possession of it. 

Now I ask, If language is that which, as a matter 


4 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


of fact, distinguishes man from all other animals, is it 
not disgraceful that we should be so careless as not to 
attempt to find out what language is, and why we, and 
we alone of all animals, enjoy the privilege of speech ? 
I know quite well that attempts have been made again 
and again to show that language is not the distinguish- 
ing characteristic of man, and that animals also, though 
they have never yet spoken, possess the faculty of 
speech, and may in time begin to speak. Even Kant 
seems to have indulged in the hope that the chimpan- 
zee might some day begin to speak. But if faculty 
means originally facility, or that which enables us to 
do a thing, surely it is not too much to ask, why hith- 
erto no animal should ever have cultivated that gift; 
why no animal should ever have said, ‘‘I am an ani- 
mal,” or, ““I am an ape.” Mr. Romanes, in his recent 
work on Mental Evolution in Man, has done his very 
best to throw a bridge over the gulf that separates all 
animals from man, namely, language; and if he has 
failed in showing how human language could have 
arisen from animal utterances, I doubt whether any- 
body else will ever lead that forlorn hope again. 

It is easy enough to show that animals communi- 
cate ; but this is a fact which has never been doubted. 
Dogs who growl and bark leave no doubt in the mind 
of other dogs, or cats, or even of man, of what they 
mean. But growling and barking are not language, 
nor do they even contain the elements of language. 
All names are concepts, and to say that we think in 
concepts is only another way of saying that we think 
in class-names. Mr. Romanes admits this fully; in 
fact, the very words I have used are his own words 
(loc. ctt., p. 22, note). But has he been able to discover 
any traces or germs of language, or what he calls ‘<in- 


FIRST LECTURE, 5 


tellectual symbolism,” in any animal known to us, and 
more particularly in that animal from which he thinks 
we are more immediately descended ? Evidently not. 
‘‘Anthropoid apes,” he says (p. 364), ‘‘are the most 
intelligent, and, therefore, if specially trained, would 
probably display greater aptitude in the matter of 
sign-making than is to be met with in any other kind 
of brute.” <‘ But,” he continues, ‘‘I do not press this 
point. What i now refer to is the fact, that the 
existing species of anthropoid apes are very few in 
number, and appear to be all on the high road to 
extinction. Moreover, it is certain that none of these 
existing species can have been the progenitor of man, 
and, lastly, it is equally certain that the extinct species 
(or genus) which did give origin to man must have 
differed in several important respects from any of its 
existing allies. In the first place, it must have been 
more social in habits; and, in the next place, it was 
probably more vociferous than the orang, the gorilla, 
or the chimpanzee.” 

Against such arguments it seems to me that even 
the gods would fight in vain. We are told, that man 
is descended from some kind of anthropoid ape. We 
answer that all anthropoid apes, known to us, are 
neither social nor vociferous. And we are told that 
in that case man must be derived from an extinct ape 
who differed from all known apes, and was both social 
and vociferous. Surely, if this is a scientific argu- 
ment, scientific arguments would in future rank very 
low indeed. 

I know of no book which has proved more clearly 
that language forms an impassable barrier between 
man and beast than the book lately published by Mr. 
Romanes on the Origin of Human Faculty, though 


6 SCIENCE Of LANGUAGE. 


his object was the very opposite. Taking that point 
therefore for granted, it seems to me disgraceful that 
in our general system of education, and even of 
elementary education, no place should have been 
found as yet for the Science of Language, and that a 
single child should be allowed to grow up, without 
knowing the worth and value of his most precious 
inheritance, without knowing what language is; lan- 
guage, which alone distinguishes him from all other 
animals; language, which alone makes man man; lan- 
guage, which has made him the lord of nature, and has 
restored to him the consciousness of his own true Self. 

And here I must guard at once against an outcry 
that is sure to be raised. It will be said that all 
these arguments are inspired by an ill-disguised pride, 
and arise from a wish to claim a higher position for 
man than for other animals. We are told that we 
ought to be more humble, and love our neighbors 
and venerate our ancestors, even though they were 
hairy apes. I plead ‘Not guilty” to all such charges. 
By suggesting motives, any discussion may be poi- 
soned, but such suggestions have really nothing what- 
ever to do with the question which we are discussing. 
If it could be proved by irrefragable evidence that 
only a hundred years back all our ancestors were 
hairy and speechless, that would not make the slight- 
est difference in our argument. On the contrary, it 
would only enhance our admiration of language, 
which, whether in one or in a hundred centuries, could 
have wrought such a marvellous charge. It would 
only make it more incumbent on us to find out what 
language really is, that it should have produced, not 
only a new species of animal, the homo sapiens, but an 
entirely new world. That language as raised man 


FIRST LECTURE. 4 


into an entirely new atmosphere, an intellectual at- 
mosphere which no other animal is able to breathe, is 
admitted on all sides. 

Is it not disgraceful, then, I ask once more—is it 
not disgraceful that we should pass through life with- 
out attempting to know what that atmosphere really is 
from which we draw our best intellectual life? No 
one is considered educated without a knowledge of 
writing, reading, and arithmetic. To me it seems that 
no one should call himself educated who does not 
know what language is, and how it came to be what 
it is. 

At first sight all we seem to be able to say of lan- 
guage is that it is wonderful, that it passes all under- 
standing, or, as some people would say, that it is 
something supernatural and miraculous. That cer- 
tain vibrations of air which we produce by various 
emissions of our breath should represent to us and to 
others all that has ever passed through our mind, all 
we have ever seen or heard or felt, all that passes be- 
fore us in the countless works of nature, and all that 
passes within us in our own endless feelings, our imag- 
inings, and our thoughts, is marvellous indeed. In fact, 
next to the great miracle of existence, there is no greater 
miracle than this translation of all existence into hu- 
man speech and human thought. 

But, as with all true miracles, so with this, our first 
duty is to try to interpret it, because then only will it 
reveal to us all that it was meant to reveal. And with 
regard to the miracle wrought by language, nothing is 
really more miraculous than its simplicity. It is gen- 
erally supposed that the philosophy of language is a 
subject far beyond the reach of ordinary minds. I 
should be sorry to suppose that there were any minds 


8 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


which could not take in the simple lessons of the 
Science of Language. We never know anything truly, 
‘unless we can make it as clear as daylight to the com- 
monest understanding. Every one of us starts from 
the level of the ordinary understanding, and however 
far he may advance, unless he has lost the thread of 
his own knowledge, that is, unless he has allowed his 
own mind to get ravelled, tangled, and knotted, he 
ought to be able to lead others step by step to the 
same eminence which he has reached himself. 

In no science is this more easy than in the Science 
of Language. It is difficult to teach a man music 
who cannot playa single instrument. But we all play 
at least one language, and can test the teachings of 
the Science of Language by a reference to our own 
language. 

I shall try therefore to show you what the Science 
of Language has achieved, by taking my illustrations 
chiefly from a language which you all know—from 
English. And though I cannot ina few lectures attempt 
to give you more than the A B C of our science, still 
even that A B C may be useful, and may possibly en- 
courage some of you to pay more attention to the study 
of so familiar, and yet so little explored a subject as 
our language is. It has indeed many lessons to teach 
us, many mysteries to reveal to us, and there is in it 
more work to do for any one who wishes to do useful 
work, than in any other science which I know of. 

When we are told that the English language con- 
sists of about 250,000 words, we are no doubt stag- 
gered, and do not know how such a number of signs 
could have arisen, and how they can all be kept in our 
memory, each in its own place. But this large number 
of words is really an accumulation of many centuries, 


FIRST LECTURE. 9 


and nothing like that number could have been kept 
alive, except through the influence of literature. 

Now literature, or, at least, a written literature, is 
amereaccident. Let ustry, therefore, to realise what 
a language would be which possesses as yet no litera- 
ture, and, therefore, no literary standard. Such lan- 
guages still exist, and we find them generally full of 
dialectic variety. They vary as spoken colloquially in 
each family ; they vary still more as spoken in different 
clans and colonies. In both these forms, as colloquial 
and as dialectic, they are full of what we may call 
slang,—expressions started by the whims of individ- 
uals, but often retained, and admitted after a time into 
more general use. 

The first beginning of a settled form of speech is 
made at public gatherings, where a language must be 
used that is intelligible to persons belonging to different 
families and coming from distant settlements. This 
public language, which is soon adopted for sacred 
poetry also, for popular legends, and for legal enact- 
ments, becomes in time what is called the sacred, the 
literary, or the classical dialect. But it does not ab- 
sorb: the whole life of a language. On the contrary, 
each language runs on in its natural channels of col- 
loquial speech and dialect and slang, and supplies from 
time to time new material to the classical dialect. 

What thus takes place before our very eyes in 
illiterate languages, must have taken place in all lan- 
guages, and we can see the same forces at work, even 
now, in such highly cultivated literary forms of speech 
as English. 

There is one kind of English which is spoken in 
parliament, in the pulpit, and in the courts of law, 


igo) SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


which may be called the pudlic, the ordinary, and rec- 
ognised English. 

The calloguial English, as used by educated people, 
differs but slightly from this parliamentary English, 
though it admits greater freedom of construction, and 
a more familiar phraseology. 

The “iterary English again requires still greater 
grammatical accuracy, and admits a number of uncom- 
mon, poetical, and even antiquated expressions which 
would sound strange in ordinary conversation. 

The dialectic English is by no means extinct. The 
peasants in every part of England and Scotland and 
Ireland, though they understand a sermon in church, 
and read their newspaper, both of which are written 
in literary English, continue to speak their own lan- 
guage among themselves,—a language full of ancient 
and curious expressions which often throw much light 
on the history of classical English. These dialects 
have of late been most carefully collected, and this is 
a branch of study in which everybody, if only he has 
a well-trained ear, is able to render most valuable as- 
sistance. 

Lastly, in discussing special subjects, we are driven 
to use a large number of ¢echnical, scientific, foreign, 
and even s/ang expressions, many of which are quite 
unintelligible to the ordinary speaker. 

It is these technical, scientific, foreign, and slang 
terms which swell our dictionaries to such an enor- 
mous size. We are told that the new Oxford Dic- 
tionary will contain a quarter of a million of words. 
Does any one of us know 250,000 English words? I 
doubt it. It is extraordinary how many words this 
small brain of ours will hold, but there are limits to 
everything. In China a young man receives his first 


FIRST LECTURE. ip at 


or second class in examination, according to the num- 
ber of words he can read and write. But in order to 
obtain the place of an imperial historian, a candidate 
is not required to know more than g,o00. We do more 
than this. Most of us can read Shakespeare’s plays, 
and in order to do that, we must know about 15,000 
words. But though we understand most of these words 
(there are only about 500 to 600 words in Shakespeare 
which may justly be called obsolete), there are many 
we should never think of using ourselves. Most of us, 
I believe, never use more than 3,000 or 4,000 words, 
and we are assured that there are peasants who never 
use more than 300 or 400. This does not mean that 
they would not understand more than that number, 
for the Bible which they hear in church contains about 
6,000 words ;! these they would understand more or 
less accurately, though they would never think of using 
them. 


NO MYSTERY IN LANGUAGE. 


A language, therefore, is after all not so bewilder- 
ing a thing as it seems to be, when we hear of a dic- 
tionary of 250,000 words. In fact, for all the ordinary 
purposes of life a dictionary of 4,000 words would be 
quite sufficient. 

Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Lan- 
guage, which confines itself to primary words,—that 
is to say, which would explain /uck, but not ducky, 
unlucky, luckless,—deals with no more than 13,500 en- 
tries. Of these only 4,000 are of Teutonic origin ; 5,000 


1According to W. T. Adey, The English of King James's Version, the Old 
and New Testaments contain 6,000 words, 


12 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


are taken from French; 2,700 direct from Latin, 400 
from Greek, about 250 from Celtic, and the rest from 
various sources. If, therefore, we confine our atten- 
tion to that portion of English which is Teutonic, we 
find that English proper consists of about 4,000 inde- 
pendent words, and that all the rest are derived from 
these. 

Let us now examine some of the words which swell 
our dictionaries to such an enormous extent, in order 
to see whether they really belong to the living lan- 
guage, and whether we ourselves should be able to 
understand them. 

And first of all a few antiguated words—words which 
were used some centuries ago, but are now to be found 
in the dictionary only. 

Do you understand anred and anredness? Anred 
means single-minded. It is derived from red (red), 
purpose, plan, scheme, and, like anfa/d, German ein- 
faltig, meant originally not-planning, not-scheming. 
Hence anredness came to mean singleness, and in the 
thirteenth century people spoke of the onrednesse of 
luve and onnesse of heorte. 

You might guess the meaning of avenant when you 
read in Caxton’s Myrr., I. xiv. 45, ‘A Lytil man is ofte 
wel made and avenaunt,’” i. e. a little man is often well- 
made and becoming orcomely. Avenant is derived 
from avenir, to come, to become, and meant agreeable, 
becoming, handsome; but no one would use that word 
now. 

If you saw two men fighting, and one of them were 
called a regular dangster, you might probably guess 
what was meant; but, though Walter Scott still uses 
the word in Zhe Adédot, it is no longer a living word. 
There was an old legal expression to commit a burg- 


FIRST LECTURE. : 13 


lary ‘‘ dy bangstrie and force.” This again would hardly 
be intelligible, except to the historical student of law. 

There are other words which survive, but the orig- 
inal meaning of which has become antiquated. In the 
legal phrase, ‘‘by assault and battery,’ for instance, 
battery still retains its original meaning, namely, beat- 
ing or striking. But we could no longer say, to give 
a boy a battery; we must say a flogging. In ordi- 
nary parlance battery now only means a number of 
artillery, while men of science speak also of an elec- 
tric battery. 

It is curious to observe in how many words the 
meaning deteriorates, while it very seldom improves. 

A knave was originally a young man, in German 
cin Knabe. In the Court cards the knave is simply 
the page or the knight, but by no means the villain. 
Villain itself was originally simply the inhabitant of a 
village. A pleader once made good use of his etymo- 
logical knowledge. For this is what Swift relates: 
‘‘T remember, at a trial in Kent, where Sir George 
Rook was indicted for calling a gentleman knave and 
villain, the lawyer for the defendent brought off his 
client by alleging the words were not injurious, for 
knave, in the old and true signification, imported only 
a servant; and w7/aim in Latin is wil/icus, which is no 
more than a man employed in country labor, or 
rather a baily.” 

I doubt whether in these days any Judge, if pos- 
sessed of some philological knowledge, would allow 
such a quibble to pass, or whether in return he would 
not ask leave to call the lawyer an zdo/, for zdot, as you 
know, meant originally no more than a private person, 
a man who does not take part in public affairs; and 


14 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


afterwards only came to mean an outsider, an ill- 
informed man, and lastly an idiot. 

A pagan was originally, like vz//ain, the raha trate 
of a pagus, a countryman. It came to mean heathen, 
because it was chiefly in the country, outside the town, 
that the worshippers of the old national gods were 
allowed to continue. A heathen was originally a 
person living on the heath. Heathen, however, is not 
yet a term of reproach ; it simply expresses a difference 
of opinion between ourselves and others. But we have 
the same word under another disguise, namely as 
howten. At present hoiden is used in the sense of a 
vulgar, romping girl. But in old authors it is chiefly 
applied to men, to clowns or louts. We may call 
Socrates a heathen, but we could not call him a 
hoiden, though we might possibly apply that name to 
his wife Xanthippe. 

Sometimes it happens that the same word can be 
used both in a good and in a bad sense. Simplicity 
with us has generally a good meaning. We read in 
the Bible of s¢mplicity and godly sincerity. But, in the 
same Bible the simple ones are reproved: «How 
long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity ? and 
the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate 
knowledge?” (Prov. I. 22.) 

If at present we were to call a boy an imp, he 
would possibly be, offended. But in Spenser’s time imp 
had still a very good sound, and he allows a noble lady, 
a lady gent, as he calls her, to address Arthur, as 
‘‘Thou worthy imp” (Faerie Queen, I. 9. 6). Nor is 
there any harm in that word, for zmp meant originally 
graft, and then offspring. To graft in German is empfen, 
and this is really a corruption of the Greek éuquerv 
to implant. 


FIRST LECTURE. 15 


Brat is now an offensive term, even when applied 
to achild. It is said to be a Welsh word, and to sig- 
nify arag. It may be so, but in that case it would be 
difficult to account for 4va¢ having been used originally 
in a good sense. This must have been so, for we find 
in ancient sacred poetry such expressions as, ‘‘O 
Abraham’s brats, o broode of blessed seede.”’ 

To use the same word in such opposite meanings 
is possible only where there is an historical literature 
which keeps alive the modern as well as the antiquated 
usages of a language. In illiterate languages, anti- 
quated words are forgotten and vanish. 

Think of all the meanings imbedded in the word 
nice! How did they come there? The word has a long 
history, and has had many ups and downs in its pas- 
sage through the world. It was originally the Latin 
nescius, ignorant, and it retained that meaning in old 
French, and likewise in old English. Robert of 
Gloucester (p. 106, last line) still uses the word in that 
sense. ‘‘He was nyce,” he says, ‘‘and kowthe no 
wisdom,” that is, he was ignorant and knew no wis- 
dom. But if there is an ignorance that is bliss, there 
is also an ignorance, or unconsciousness, or simplicity 
that is charming. Hence an unassuming, ingenuous, 
artless person was likewise called nice. However, even 
that artlessness might after a time become artful, or, 
at all events, be mistaken by others for artfulness. 
The over-nice person might then seem fastidious, dif- 
ficult to please, too dainty, and he or she was then 
said to be too nice in his or her tastes. 

We have traced the principal meanings of wzce from 
ignorant to fastidious, as applied to persons. If nice 
is applied to things, it has most commonly the mean- 
ing of charming ; but as we speak of a fastidious and 


16 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


difficult person, we can also speak of a difficult matter 
as a nice matter, or a nice point. 

At last there remained zzce, which simply expresses 
general approval. Everything, in our days, is nice, 
not to say, awfully nice. But unless we possessed a 
literature in which to study the history of words, it 
would be simply impossible to discover why nice should 
express approval as well as disapproval, nay, why it 
should in the end become a mere emphatic expression, 
as when we say, ‘‘ That is a nice business,” or ‘that 
is a nice mess.” 

And here we approach a new class of words which 
swell our dictionaries very considerably, namely, s/ang- : 
words. Slang is more than a colloquial and familiar 
expression, it always conveys the idea of being a little 
vulgar. It is quite true that some expressions which 
we call slang were perfectly correct some centuries ago, 
and that they have the right to claim a place among 
antiquated words. The Americans are very clever at 
making out that most of their slang was pure classical 
English some centuries ago. That may be so; in 
many cases it no doubt is so. But that does not take 
away the peculiar twang of what has now become 
slang. A distinguished American politician declared 
that under certain circumstances he would let the Con- 
stitution ‘‘slide.” That certainly was slang. But 
when he was blamed for his undignified expression, he 
appealed to Chaucer and Shakespeare, who use the 
same word in such phrases as, ‘‘ Wel neigh all other 
cures let he slyde”; she ‘‘lete her sorwe slide”; ‘he 
lets the world slide.” é 

It is often difficult to say why certain colloquial 
expressions are vulgar, while others are allowed to 
pass. Much depends on the speaker, for you may say 


FIRST LECTURE. 7 


almost anything in English, if you know how to say it. 
There is no harm in saying ‘‘ You bet”; yet in America 
it is a sign of vulgarity. ‘‘I am very dry” is slang, «I 
am very thirsty” is quite correct ; yet thirsty meant 
originally dry, and we may still speak of ‘‘thirsty land,”’ 
instead of dry land. yirsty is connected with Latin 
torrere, to parch, Greek répoeoai, to become dry. 

‘¢T have been enjoying poor health” is certainly 
wrong, but I doubt whether poor or bad health is a 
solecism. It is true that health by itself means sound- 
ness of body, and is connected with hale, healing, and 
whole (for hole). But as wecan speak of good and bad 
luck, there is no serious objection to our speaking of 
good, or bad, or indifferent health. 

The frequent use of the verb /o ge¢ is in bad taste, 
but again, it can hardly be called wrong. When we 
read, ‘‘I got my things packed, and goé to the train in 
time, and gof¢ to Paris, and go¢ to the hotel, and got my 
supper, and gof sleepy, and soon go¢ to bed, and gota 
good night’s rest,’ we can understand all that is meant, 
but we feel offended by the poverty and vulgarity of 
the expression. 

Sometimes, however, slang becomes utterly unin- 
telligible, and requires a commentary except to the 
initiated. I shall read a sentence from a Melbourne 
paper, which I hope few here present will understand 
without the help of explanatory notes : 

««Say, mate, some our’n cockneys chummed with 
‘em Melbourne larrikins at yon booze-ken. Flash 
coves, blacklegs, and welchers that they be, they lushed 
like old ’Arry till on ’em kicked the bucket. They 
told a bobby that coomed by as they was gents. 
‘That’s all my heye and Betty Martin,’ says he—and 
he slips on the darbies and brought ’em to quod.”’ 


18 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


This, no doubt, is very vulgar English, but it is 
English for all that, and if there ever should be a 
violent social revolution at Melbourne, and the lower 
classes should become the upper classes, it is quite 
possible that this kind of English might be spoken 
there in parliament and even in the pulpit. We must 
not forget that in its origin every language may be 
called vulgar. It is the language of the vw/gus, before 
it becomes the language of literature. Even Dante 
calls his Italian 27 volgare, and he was the first to use 
that common spoken idiom for the highest literary 
purposes. 

There are slang-dictionaries, as large as the dic- 
tionaries of any language, and I am sorry to say that 
even our Universities contribute every year a fair share 
toward new and enlarged editions of these books. 
Little go, Moderations, Greats, to be ploughed, to be 
sulphed, are well-known specimens of this mysterious 
language. There are many more which it is perhaps 
wiser not to mention. 

As to technical and scientific terms, they are end- 
less. Try to speak with a boot-maker ora carpenter 
about his own tools and his own work, and you will be 
surprised at the unknown treasures of the English 
language. Not long ago a wine-merchant to whom I 
had complained about some bottles of wine not being 
quite full, wrote to me to return the wd/aged bottles. 
I did not understand w//aged, and I had to consult a 
dictionary. There I found that ew//age in ancient 
French meant that which is required to fill a bottle, 
from ewiller, to fill. This euél/er is supposed to stand 
for o/ier, to oil. But why to oil? Because in the South 
of France and Italy to the present day oil is poured 
into a bottle, instead of corking it. That oil has to be 


FIRST LECTURE. sae) 


dashed out before the wine is drunk, and a certain 
amount of wine is lost in that process. That is the 
eullage, and hence the w/laged bottle. I doubt whether 
my wine-merchant knew this, and it is strange that a 
custom which obtained only in the South of Europe 
of using oil for closing bottles of wine, should have 
produced an expression which was used in the North 
of Europe, where oil was never used for that purpose. 
That shows how words travel forward and backward 
over the whole world. 

When I was in Cornwall I heard the smoked pil- 
chards called by the people Fair Maids. I tried to 
find out why, and this was the result of my inquiries. 
These smoked pilchards are largely exported to Genua, 
and are eaten there during Lent. They are called in 
Italian fwmada, smoked fish. The Cornish sailors 
picked up that word, naturalised it, gave it an intel- 
ligible meaning, and thus became, according to their 
own confession, exporters of fair maids. You see the 
Odyssey and the adventures of Ulysses are nothing 
compared with the adventures of our words. 

A carpenter once told me that the boards of a box 
ought to be properly dowald. 1 did not understand 
what he meant, and it was only when he showed me 
the actual process that I saw that to dowa/ meant to 
dove-tail, to cut the ends so that they should fit like 
dove-tails. 

Scientific terms are likewise technical terms, only 
put into Greek or Latin. What can be achieved in the 
manufacture of such terms may be gathered from the 
following extract from a book on Botany :1 

‘«<Begoniaceae, by their anthero-connectival fabric 
indicate a close relationship with anonaceo-hydro- 


1 Marsh, Lectures on the English Language, p. 186. 


20 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE, 


charideo-nymphaeoid forms, an affinity confirmed by 
the serpentarioid flexuoso-nodulous stem, the lirioden- 
droid stipules, and cissoid and victorioid foliage of a 
certain Begonia; and if considered hypogynous, would 
in their triquetrous capsule, alate seed, apetalism, and 
tufted stamination, represent the floral fabric of Ne- 
penthes, itself of aristolochioid affinity, while by its 
pitchered leaves, directly belonging to Sarracenias and 
Dionaeas.”’ 

I doubt whether any Englishman, unless he be a 
botanist by profession, would understand the hidden 
meaning of these sentences, and though these words 
have to be admitted into an English dictionary that 
professes to be complete, they cannot be said to form 
part of the commonwealth of English undefiled. 

If, then, we confine our attention to those words 
which form the real stock in trade of the English lan- 
guage, our task will become much more manageable. 
Instead of 250,000, we shall have to deal with about 
4,000 truly English words, or, if we include all French, 
Latin, Greek, and Celtic primaries, with 12,350 
words, and then ask ourselves once more the ques- 
tion, Whence do they come? 

No one can help seeing that even amongst the most 
ordinary words in English there are some which are 
very much alike in sound. If these words have also 
some similarity in meaning, we are justified in suppos- 
ing that they may have a common origin. 

Take, for instance, such words as /o bear, burden, 
bier, and barrow. They all have the same constituent 
element, namely, 47; they all havea meaning connected 
with bearing or carrying. Burden is what is carried ; 
bier, what a person is carried on; barrow, in wheel- 
barrow, an implement for carrying things. 


FIRST LECTURE, 2. 


No doubt, this is only prima facie evidence. We 
must not forget that we are dealing with a modern 
language which has passed through many vicissitudes. 
In order to institute truly scientific comparisons, we 
should have in each case to trace these words to their 
Anglo-Saxon, or even to their corresponding Gothic 
forms. 

How great the danger is of trusting to mere simi- 
larity of sound in modern languages, you will see at 
once, if you take the last word éarrow, which means 
not only a wheelbarrow, but also a burial-mound. 
We have only to trace this darrow back to its Anglo- 
Saxon form decor, in order to see that it has nothing 
to do with bearing or carrying, but that it is connected 
with the Anglo-Saxon dcorgan, the German dergen, to 
hide, to protect. 

But though it is necessary, before we institute 
comparisons, always to go back to the oldest forms of 
words which are within our reach, still for practical 
purposes it suffices if we know that such words as dear, 
burden, bier, and barrow have all been proved to come 
from one common source. 

And more than this. As ¢o dear is used in many 
languages in the sense of bearing children, we may 
safely trace to the same source such English words as 
birth, and bairn, a child. 

Nay, as the same expression is also used of the 
earth-bearing fruit, we can hardly be wrong in ex- 
plaining, for instance, dar/ey, as what the earth bears 
or brings forth. In German Gefreide, M. H. G. Ge- 
tregede, literally, what is born, has become the name of 
every kind of corn. If we go back to Anglo-Saxon, 
we find Je@r-lic for barley, in which “Zc is derivative, 
while dere by itself meant barley. In Scotland more 


22 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


particularly dear continued to be used for barley, anda 
coarse kind of barley is still called dear-darley. Barn 
also receives its explanation from the same quarter. 
For darn is contracted from Jdere-@rn, which means 
barley-house, or, as also called, bere-flor. 

We have thus collected eight words, which all con- 
tain one common element, namely 47, and which prima 
facie come from the same source. Their various 
meanings, aS we saw, can likewise be traced back to 
the one fundamental concept of bearing. 

From every one of these words ever so many de- 
rivatives may be formed, and have been formed. 

Think only of the numerous offspring of ¢o dear, 
and the various meanings that can be conveyed by that 
one word. We have, to bear up, to bear out, to bear 
oneself, proud bearing, to bear in mind, to bear with, 
to forbear; then to bear down on a person, in the 
sense of to press hard on him, to bear away, said of a 
ship that sails away, to lose one’s bearings, bearable, 
unbearable, a bearer, an office-bearer, bearing in the 
sense of behavior, child-bearing, and many more. 

Now you begin to see how thrifty language can be, 
and what immense results it can achieve with very 
small means. It starts with a syllable of two conso- 
nants, such as dar, and out of it, by means of deriva- 
tives, it forms a perfect army of words. If we hada 
hundred such syllables, and derived only forty words 
from each, we should possess what, as we found, is 
wanted for carrying on all social and intellectual inter- 
course, namely, 4,000 words. 

But now we shall be asked, What are those mys- 
terious syllables? What is, for instance, that dar, 
which we discovered as the kernel of ever so many 
words? 


FIRST LECTURE. 23 


These syllables have been called roots. That is, of 
course, nothing but a metaphorical expression. What 
is meant is neither more nor less than what you saw 
just now as the result of our comparison—namely, 
what remains of a number of words after we separate 
the purely formative elements. In éwr-den, den is 
formative: in d7rth, th is formative; in darn, mis form- 
ative. In darn, too, zis formative, but it is different 
from the » in dairn, because it is really a contraction 
of ern. Bere-ern meant a place for barley, just .as 
horsern meant a place for horses, a stable, s/epern, a 
sleeping-place.! 

There remains therefore Jar with a variable vowel, 
and this we call a root, or an ultimate element of 
speech, because it cannot be analysed any further. 

This root dar, however, isnot an English root. It 
existed long before English existed, and we find it 
again in Latin, Greek, Celtic, Slavonic, Zend, and 
Sanskrit, that is, in all the languages which form what 
is called the 4vyan family of speech. As this root dar 
exists in Latin as fer, in Greek as pep, in Celtic as der, 
in Slavonic as Jer, in Zend as dar, and in Sanskrit as 
bhar, it is clear that it must have existed before these 
languages separated, and that, as you may imagine, 
must have been a very, very long time ago. 

But you may ask, How did these roots exist ? 
Were they ever independent words, or did they only 
exist in their derivatives? Of course, it is impossible 
to answer this question by historical evidence. If any- 
thing deserves to be called pre-historic, it is the period 
of language which precedes the formation of Sanskrit, 
Greek, and Latin. But if we argue by analogy, we 
may say that as in Chinese, so in this Proto-Aryan 


1 Morris, AW7storical Outlines, § 322. 


24 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


language, these roots, without any formative suffixes 
or prefixes, were probably used by themselves. On the 
other hand, it is quite true that, as soon as one of these 
roots was used either as a subject or as a predicate, it 
had really ceased to be a root in the true sense of that 
word, and had become a noun, or a verb, or an ad- 
jective. 

Hitherto, it seems to me, there is nothing difficult, 
nothing uncertain, nothing mysterious in this process 
of taking our language to pieces, and separating the 
radical from the formal elements. It is no more than 
cracking a nut and separating the kernel from the 
shell. What the result of this cracking and peeling 
has been, I shall try to explain to you in my next 
lecture. 


SEGONDIUECEURE: 


. THE ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE. 


E SAW at the end of our last lecture by what 
process the constituent elements of a language 
can be discovered. It is avery simple process. You 
take a word, remove from it all that can be accounted 
for, that is, all that can be proved to be purely forma- 
tive and derivative; and what cannot be accounted 
for, what cannot be further analysed, you accept as an 
element, as an ultimate fact, or, as scholars are in the 
habit of calling it, as a root. 

Now let me tell you, first of all, that this chemical 
analysis of words is by no means a new invention. 
It was performed for the first time more than 2,000 
years ago by the grammarians of India. They reduced 
the whole of their abounding language to about 1,706 
roots.! Given these roots, they professed to be able 
to account for every word in Sanskrit, and toa certain 
extent they achieved it. Considering the time when 
that experiment was carried out, it strikes us as per- 
fectly marvellous. We, in Europe, were still savages 
at that time, entirely unacquainted with letters or 
literature. Still, we have made some advance over 


1 Scvence of Language, Vol. 1. p. 306. 


26 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


Pamini, and Mr. Edgren has reduced the number of 
necessary roots to 816, afterwards to 633, and at last 
to 587.1 With these roots he thinks that the great 
bulk of the Sanskrit vocabulary can be accounted for. 
And here again we may say that, with certain well- 
understood exceptions, this promise has been fulfilled. 
For instance, the root dar, or dhar, particularly if we 
include the words derived from Latin ferre and adopted 
in English, such as, for instance, /fertz/e, far (barley), 
farina, barley-flower, reference, deference, conference, 
difference, inference, preference, transference, and all the 
rest, would yield more than a hundred English words. 
We should not want therefore more than a hundred 
such roots to account for 10,000 words in English. 
Now, as a matter of fact, the number of Aryan roots 
which have left offspring in English, is only about 
460.2, When all the offspring of a root dies, of course 
the root itself comes to an end, and this is what has 
happened to a number of roots which are required to 
account for words in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, but 
no longer, for any words existing in English. 

It stands to reason that all these statements are 
broad statements. There is in every language a con- 
siderable residue of words which has not yet been 
traced back to any root. There are likewise many 
words which are not to be derived from roots at all, 
but come straight from imitations of sounds, or inter- 
jections. To this class belong such words as cuckoo, 
moo (cow), bah (lamb), to click, to hiss. The Greeks 
called the formation of such words onomatopoeia or 
word-manufacturing, by which they meant that they 
formed a class by themselves, that they were mere 

ISczence of Thought, p. 377. 

2Skeat, Etymological Dictionary, pp. 729, seq. 


SECOND LECTURE. 27 


made words, artificial words, not real and natural 
words, like all the rest. 

Besides there are interjections, such as ah, of, fie, 
pooh, pah, and all the rest. 

Still, to put the matter broadly—and I cannot here 
attempt more than to give you the broad outlines of 
the Science of Language—we have now come to this. 
Instead of being startled and staggered by 250,000 of 
words, all crowding in upon us and asking us what 
they are and whence they came, we are now only con- 
fronted by four or five hundred words or roots, and 
have to render some account of them. If we can do 
that, the world-old riddle of the origin of language is 
solved. How from these roots the whole wealth of 
English was evolved has been shown by Comparative 
Grammer. Here all formative elements, such as suf- 
fixes, prefixes, infixes, all case-terminations, all per- 
sonal and tense-terminations, have been classified, 
and traced back, more or less successfully, to so-called 
demonstrative elements. Here also much remains 
still to be done, but the broad fact is established once 
for all, that all we call grammar is the result of syn- 
thesis between predicative roots and demonstrative 
elements, often also between words, ready made. 

Thus ézrth was originally dhar, to bear, plus a de- 
monstrative element /z, in English #4, which localises 
the act of bearing here and there. 

The Sanskrit bi-bhar-mi shows us the same root 
reduplicated, so as to express continuous action, and 
followed by mi as a personal demonstrative. Bearing-/ 
comes to mean, I bear. 

The English éear-able is a compound of dear with 
the Roman suffix ad/e, the Latin adzlis, which ex- 
presses fitness. 


28 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


Instances of composition of ready-made words, we 
have in English in such words as hwzzy, which stands 
for housewife ; or world, which stands for weor = man, 
and y/d, age ; god-less, which means loose or away from 
God ; god-ly, which means like God. 

We have now to face the final question, What are 
these roots? If we can answer that, we shall know 
what language is. We shall not simply stare at it in 
silent wonderment, nor shall we repeat the old answer 
that we learnt it from our mother, and our mother 
from her mother, and thus ad infinitum. We shall 
probably wonder at it all the more, but with an intel- 
ligent wonder and pleasure, and not simply with a 
vacant stare, that so much could have been made out 
of so little. 

All roots which we find in English, in Sanskrit, or 
rather in that stratum of language which lies even 
beneath Sanskrit, are perfectly definite in sound. 
Their consonants are guttural, dental, or labial, surd, 
sonant, or aspirated. These consonants can be modi- 
fied according to certain rules, but they are not vague 
and indefinite, as is often the case with the vowels and 
consonants of less developed languages. 

Secondly, they nearly all express acts, such as 
bearing, striking, pushing, cutting, tearing. And you 
will find, if you trace even the most abstract and 
elevated notions back to their original source, they 
are borrowed from such material concepts as tearing, 
pushing, and all the rest. Adstract, for instance, is 
what is torn away, e/evated what is pushed aloft. 

Thirdly, they are all conceptual, that is to say they 
do not express a single percept, as, for instance, the 
sound of cuckoo, or moo, or bah, but they signify acts, 
or qualities, conceived as the result of acts. Percept, 


SECOND LECTURE. 29 


as you know, is the technical name given to our cog- 
nisance of a single object actually perceived by the 
senses ; while concept is the technical term for our 
cognisance of something common to several objects, 
which can never by itself be conceived by the senses. 
Thus szow is called a percept, the whzte of snow a con- 
cept. 

When logicians ask, how we came to form con- 
cepts, they seem to see no difficulty whatever in this 
process. There was w/z¢e in snow, they say, in chalk, 
and in milk; and the sign for this common quality was 
the sound w/z¢e. So, no doubt, it is with us ; but in the 
evolution of the human mind, the forming of concepts 
represents quite a new epoch, and like everything else 
in that evolution, we must try to discover some natural 
necessity for it. Now the first natural necessity for 
our taking cognisance of two or more percepts as one, 
lies in our own acts. Most of our acts are repeated 
acts. We do not strike, or push, or rub once only, but 
repeatedly. This consciousness, therefore, of our own 
repeated acts as one action, grew by necessity into our 
first conceptual knowledge, and that primitive con- 
ceptual knowledge is embodied in those very roots 
which, as we saw, were the feeders of all human 
speech. When this conceptual tendency was once 
started, it would go on growing stronger with every 
new generation, till at last our whole intellectual life 
became, as it now is, conceptual. It is the beginning 
of this peculiar mental operation that has to be ex- 
plained, and it should be explained, if possible, as 
brought about by the same natural necessity which 
forces us to see and to hear. I do not say that the 
consciousness of our own repeated acts is the only 
possible way in which the beginning of concepts can 


30 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


be explained. All I say is that it is the most natural 
explanation, and that it is confirmed in the most un- 
expected way by the facts of language. 

One more question now remains. Why should the 
consciousness of our acts be accompanied by certain 
definite sounds, such as déhar, to bear, mar, to rub, szd, 
to stop, fan, to stretch? Here again our answer can 
only be hypothetical. Often though we cannot drive 
our shaft into a deep geological stratum, we can guess 
by analogy what its constituent elements must have 
been. It is the same in the geology of language. 

With regard to the sounds accompanying our no- 
tions, we know from physiology that under any strong 
muscular effort it is arelief to the system to let our breath 
come out strongly and repeatedly, and by that process 
to let the vocal cords vibrate in different ways. That is 
the case with savages, and it is the case even with us. 
These natural sounds accompanying our acts are 
called clamor concomitans. Navvies when they have to 
lift a heavy weight together, shout Yo feo. Sailors, 
when they pull together, have their own monotonous 
song. Even children, when they march or dance, 
break out naturally in some kind of rhythmic sing- 
song. Here we have at all events a hint,—for I will 
say no more,—how this natural music which accom- 
panied the acts of early people, this clamor concomitans, 
could have supplied the outward signs of the inward 
concepts of these acts. What we want are natural 
signs of concepts, not of percepts. If our thoughts 
and our language consisted of percepts only, the sound 
of cuckoo for the cuckoo, of moo for cow, and dah for 
lamb would have been amply sufficient. But we must 
take language as it is. Language as it is, is derived 
from sounds which express the consciousness of our 


SECOND LECTURE. 31 


acts, and which are 7/so facto conceptual. Such sounds 
can be supplied, as it seems to me, through one chan- 
nel only, namely, from the sounds which accompany 
our acts, and particularly such acts as are performed 
in common with our fellow-men. From the fact that 
these primitive acts were performed in common, an- 
other advantage arises, namely, that the sounds which 
accompany them, and which afterwards are to remind 
us of them, are naturally understood by others as well 
as by ourselves, in every part of the world where a be- 
ginning of social life is made. 

Let us see now what are the results at which we 
have arrived, not by a prior7 theories about language 
and thought, but by a mere analysis of facts, of the 
facts of language, as garnered in our dictionaries and 
grammars. 

We found that a small number of insignificant little 
syllables, such as dhar, or dhar, or mar, or pat, or 
man formed the elements with which the whole Eng- 
lish language had been put together. We found that 
a somewhat larger number sufficed to account for the 
whole verbal harvest of all the Aryan languages, such 
as Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, Russian, German, 
and Welsh. I may add that a similar analysis of the 
Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic 
has led to exactly the same result, and that in other 
families of languages also, outside the pale of Aryan 
and Semitic, something corresponding to our roots 
has been discovered as the residue of a careful etymo- 
logical analysis. 

We may now with perfect safety make another step 
in advance. 

These so-called roots, these insignificant little syl- 
lables, which form the foundation of all that we call 


32 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


language, form at the same time the impassable bar- 
rier between man and beast. Whatever animals may 
be able to do—and no one who has watched intelligent 
animals without preconceived opinions, can doubt that 
they can do almost everything that we do, only in their 
own way—but whatever the cleverest animals are able 
to do, they cannot form these little syllables as signs 
of concepts. And as what we mean bya concept can- 
not come into existence except by a sign, we may 
argue, with a certain amount of plausibility, that ani- 
mals have not what we call concepts, and that this is 
the true reason why they have not what we mean by 
language. It may seem a very small matter, this being 
able to use a number of syllables as signs of con- 
cepts; but it forms nevertheless the szze gud non of 
language, and no one will venture to say that language 
is a small matter, even though it consists at first of 
300 words only. The first rays of language, like the 
first rays of the dawn, change the world from night to 
day, from darkness to light, from a strange phantom 
into our own home. However humble we may try to 
be, no one who really knows what language means, 
and what it has done for us, will be able to persuade 
himself that, after all, there is not a radical difference 
between him and the parrot, the elephant, or the ape. 
Here then, is one of the lessons which the Science 
of Language teaches us. It opens our eyes at first to 
the marvellousness of language, and makes us see that 
the language which we speak, and which seems to us 
so very simple, so very natural, so very familiar, is 
really something so magnificent, so wonderful, so dif- 
ferent from everything else we have or do or know, 
that some of the wisest of mankind could not help 
themselves, but had to ascribe it to a divine source. 


SECOND LECTURE. 33 


It shows us secondly, that, like all the most marvel- 
lous things, language also, if carefully studied, dis- 
closes a simplicity more wonderful even than its sup- 
posed complexity. As chemistry has shown us that 
the whole universe, the sea and the mountains, the 
earth and the sun, the trees and the animals, the sim- 
plest protoplasm and the most highly organised brain, 
are all put together with about sixty simple substances, 
Comparative Philology has taught us that with about 
400 simple radical substances, and a few demonstrative 
elements, the names and the knowledge of the whole 
universe have been elaborated. Only by being named 
does this universe become our universe, and all our 
knowledge, the accumulation of the labor of countless 
generations, is possible only because it could be handed 
down to us in the sacred shrine of language. Let 
us be humble, as much as you like; but on the other 
hand, let us not depreciate our inheritance. We have 
not made our language ourselves, we have received it. 
We are what we are by what those who came before 
us have done for us. Like the coral islands which 
have been built up by the silent and self-sacrificing in- 
dustry of millions of millions of living beings, our 
languages have been elaborated by the incessant labors 
of millions of millions of those who came before us. 
Whether those ancestors of ours were hairy, whether 
they had tails, whether they walked on all fours, or 
whether they climbed trees—what does that matter to 
us? Our body is a mere conglomerate of cells. It 
comes and goes, it is born and dies. It is not ours, 
it is not our own self. But whatever these prehistoric 
ancestors of ours may have been, they were able to 
bring to maturity and to compound in ever-varying 
forms those intellectual cells which, for want of a bet- 


34 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


ter name, we call roots, and which constitute a barrier 
between ourselves and all other living beings—a barrier 
which fortunately does not vanish by being ignored. 
The Science of Language, better than any other sci- 
ence, teaches us our true position in the world. Our 
bodily frame is like the bodily frame of the animals ; 
it is even less perfect than that of many animals. We 
are beasts, we are wild beasts, and those who have 
fought with wild beasts, not only at Ephesus, but 
within the arena of their own hearts, are least likely to 
forget that lesson. But there is a light within us, 
which not only lights up our own true self, but throws 
its rays upon the whole world that surrounds and holds 
us. That light is language. Take away that language, 
and man is lower than the dumb animals of the field 
and of the forest. Give us that language, and we are 
not only higher than all animals, but lifted up into a 
new world,, thinking thoughts and speaking words 
which the animal may obey, may even imitate, but 
which no animal can ever create, or even impart to its 
own offspring. 


THE LESSON TAUGHT BY THE SCIENCE OF 
LANGUAGE. 


I have tried hitherto to show how the Science of 
Language teaches us our true position with regard to 
animals. Let me now try to explain to you how the 
same science has taught us likewise our true position 
with regard to our fellow-men. 

I mentioned before that English belongs to what I 
call the Aryan family of speech. That means that in 


SECOND LECTURE. 35 


the same manner as Italian, French, and Spanish are 
derived from Latin, English and the other Aryan 
languages are derived from a more ancient language, 
which is lost, but which must once have had a very 
real historical existence. This lost language we call 
Aryan, or Proto-Aryan. The descendants of the Proto- 
Aryan language are known to us in seven great 
branches, called the Teutonic, the Celtic, the /talic, the 
Greek, the Slavonic, the Jranic, and the /ndzc. The 
first five constitute the Worth-Western or European, 
the other two the South-Eastern or Asiatic division. 

Now let us consider for a moment what all this 
means. English belongs to the Teutonic branch of 
the Aryan family; that means that English, and Ger- 
man, and Dutch, and Danish, and Swedish, and even 
Icelandic, are all varieties of one type of Aryan speech, 
and that all the people who speak these languages are 
held together by the closest ties of a linguistic rela- 
tionship. 

It is said that blood is thicker than water, but it 
may be said with even greater truth that language is 
thicker than blood. If, in the interior of Africa, sur- 
rounded by black men, whose utterances are utterly 
unintelligible, we suddenly met with a man who could 
speak English, we should care very little whether he 
was English, or Irish, or American. We should under- 
stand him, and be able to exchange our thoughts with 
him. That brings us together far more closely than if 
we met a Welshman speaking nothing but Welsh, or 
a Scotchman speaking nothing but Gaelic ; or, for all 
that, an Englishman who, having been brought up in 
China, could speak nothing but Chinese. A common 
language is a common bond of intellectual brother- 
hood, far stronger than any supposed or real commu- 


36 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


nity of blood. Common blood without a common 
language leaves us as perfect strangers. A common 
language, even without common blood, makes the 
whole world feel akin. 

It is quite true that the different Teutonic dialects 
have changed so much, that at present an Englishman 
can hardly understand a Dutchman, a Dutchman can 
hardly understand a German, while to a German, 
Danish and Swedish and Icelandic sound as strange 
as French and Italian. Nevertheless, in spite of dy- 
nastic and national feuds, English, Dutch, Germans, 
Danes, and Swedes, feel themselves as one, when 
brought face to face with Slavonic or Romanic nations. 
They know that by their language, if not by their 
blood, they represent a unity in the history of the world. 
The same feeling is shared most strongly by all Sla- 
vonic people. However much they may be separated 
from each other by government, religion, and general 
civilisation, against Teutonic nations the Slaves are 
one. There can be no doubt, however, that during 
the middle ages, and also in modern times, the mix- 
ture of blood between Slaves and Germans has been 
enormous. The Slavonic names of places and families 
in Germany, and the German names of places and fam- 
ilies in Bohemia, Poland, and Russia tell their own tale. 
Nevertheless, a man who speaks Bohemian, Polish, or 
Russian, feels himself a Slave ; a man who speaks 
German feels himself a German, and he can hardly 
understand what is meant when he is told that the 
blood of his great-grandfather was either Slavonic or 
Teutonic. Nor do I think that any biologist has as 
yet given us a scientific definition of what is meant by 
Slavonic or Teutonic blood, by Slavonic or Teutonic 
hair, or skulls, or skin; and until that is done, such 


eee 
a ~ 


SECOND LECTURE. 37 


undefined words should simply be boycotted in all sci- 
entific discussions. 

The Science of Language, however, professes to 
teach us something else. Whatever the so-called na- 
tional antipathy between people speaking Slavonic 
and Teutonic and Romanic languages may be, they 
have now to learn a new lesson—a lesson that may 
bear good fruit in the future, namely, that these very 
Slavonic, Teutonic, and Romanic languages, which at 
present divide the people who speak them, belong to 
one and the same family, and were once spoken by 
the common ancestors of these divided and sometimes 
hostile nations. 

At present such lessons may seem to possess a sci- 
entific interest only, in so far as they have made schol- 
ars take a completely new view of the ancient history 
of mankind. The old idea that our languages were 
all derived from Hebrew, has been surrendered long 
ago; but it was not surrendered without an effort, an 
effort almost as great as that which made the world 
surrender its faith in the central position of the 
earth. 

After that came a new surrender, of which I still 
remember the beginning and the end. I myself was 
brought up in the most straitest school of classical 
scholarship. I was led to believe that there were only 
two so-called classical languages in the world—Greek 
und Latin—and that all the other nations of Europe 
were more or less of barbarians till they were debar- 
barised by contact with Greek and Roman civilisation. 
That the language of the ancient Germans or Celts 
could have been anything but an uncouth jargon, as 
compared with the language of Homer and Virgil; 
that the grammar of the Goths could have been as 


BOus SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


perfect as that of the Hellenes; that the natives of 
Gaul and Germany could have possessed a religion, a 
mythology, and an epic poetry that could be compared 
to the religion, the mythology, and the epic poetry of 
Greeks and Romans—these are ideas which would 
have been scouted by all scholars, in fact by all edu- 
cated people, at the beginning of our century. But 
facts will have their way, however much they may be 
scouted at first. That the Gothic language was as finely 
organised as Latin, admitted of no contradiction. That 
the religion and the mythology of the Teutonic nations 
flowed from the same source as the religion and mythol- 
ogy of the Greeks and Romans, had to be granted even 
by the best Greek and Latin scholars of the day, such 
as Gottfried Hermann, Otfried Miller, and Welcker. 
And that the epic poetry of Iceland, and of Germany, 
the Edda and the Nibelunge, contained fragments of 
as peculiar beauty as the Homeric poems, was freely 
acknowledged by the foremost poets and critics in Ger- 
many, such as Herder and Goethe. 

Though no one would have denied the superiority 
of the Greek genius, and though the glory of having 
raised the world from darkness to light will forever 
remain with the Greeks, yet the Greeks, and their 
pupils, the Romans, could no longer command a posi- 
tion apart from all the rest. They had made a better 
use of the talent committed to them; it may be they 
had received from the beginning a richer endowment. 
But those whom in their pride they had called bar- 
barians, had now to be recognised as of the same kith 
and kin from the beginning, nay, destined hereafter to 
outstrip even their masters in the historic race after 
the true, the noble, and the good. Classical scholars 
who can remember the events of the last fifty years 


SECOND LECTURE. 39 


know best how radical a change every branch of clas- 
sical learning has undergone, when it became pos- 
sessed by this new comparative spirit. 

Like many movements, true in themselves, this 
movement also has sometimes been carried too far. 
No one, it was boldly asserted, could know Greek who 
did not know Sanskrit or Gothic. No one could un- 
derstand Roman mythology who had not studied mod- 
ern folk-lore. All this is true in a certain sense, but 
it has been much exaggerated. Still, our historical 
horizon has been permanently enlarged. Greeks and 
Romans have been placed in a new historical environ- 
ment, and so far from losing in their prestige, they 
only stand forth in bolder relief by the historical back- 
ground with which the Science of Language has sup- 
plied them. 

But if this feeling of fraternity between the prin- 
cipal languages of Europe can only claim a scientific 
and literary interest, it has produced very practical 
results in other quarters. The feeling between the 
white and the black man is deeply engrained in human 
nature, and in spite of all the arguments in support of 
our common humanity, it was not to be wondered at 
that the dark people of India should look upon their 
white conquerors as strangers, and that the white rulers 
of India should treat their dark subjects almost as 
people of another kind. That feeling seemed wellnigh 
unconquerable, till the discovery of Sanskrit proved 
beyond all manner of doubt that the languages spoken 
by the inhabitants of India must have sprung from 
the same source as Greek, Latin, and English. The 
name /udo-European marked not only a new epoch in 
the study of language; it ushered in a new period in 
the history of the world. Language, as I said before, 


40 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


is thicker than blood, and while a so-called community 
of blood conveys really no definite meaning at all, a 
community of Janguage that extended even to conso- 
nants, vowels, and accents, proved an intellectual fra- 
ternity far stronger than any merely genealogical rela- 
tionship. 

When the Hindus learnt for the first time that their 
ancient language, the Sanskrit, was closely connected 
with Greek and Latin, and with that uncouth jargon 
spoken by their rulers, they began to feel a pride in 
their language and their descent, and they ceased to 
look upon the pale-skinned strangers from the North 
as strange creatures from another, whether a better or 
a worse, world. They felt what we feel when later in 
life we meet with a man whom we had quite forgotten. 
But as soon as he tells us that he was at the same 
school with ourselves, as soon as he can remind us of 
our common masters, or repeat some of the slang 
terms of our common childhood and youth, he be- 
comes a schoolfellow, a fellow, a man whom we seem 
to know, though we do not even recollect his name. 
Neither the English nor the Hindus recollected their 
having been at the same school together thousands of 
years ago, but the mere fact of their using the same 
slang words, such as matar and mother, such as 
bhratar and brother, such as staras and stars, was 
sufficient to convince them that most likely they had 
been in the same scrapes and had been flogged by the 
same masters. It was not so much that either the 
one or the other party felt very much raised in their 
own eyes by this discovery, as that a feeling sprang 
up between them that, after all, they might be chips 
of the same block. I could give you ever so many 
proofs in support of this assertion, at all events on 


SECOND LECTURE. 41 


the part of the Hindus, and likewise from the speeches 
of some of the most enlightened rulers of India. But 
as I might seem to be a not altogether unprejudiced 
witness in such a matter, I prefer to quote the words 
of an eminent American scholar, Mr. Horatio Hale. 
«« When the people of Hindostan in the last century,” 
he writes, ‘‘came under the British power, they were 
regarded as a debased and alien race. Their complexion 
reminded their conquerors of Africa. Their divinities 
were hideous monsters. Their social system was anti- 
human and detestable. Suttee, Thuggee, Juggernaut, 
all sorts of cruel and shocking abominations seemed 
to characterise and degrade them. The proudest In- 
dian prince was, in the sight and ordinary speech of 
the rawest white subaltern, only a ‘nigger.’ This uni- 
versal contempt was retorted with a hatred as univer- 
sal, and threatening in the future most disastrous 
consequences to the British rule. Then came an un- 
expected and wonderful discovery. European philol- 
ogists, studying the language of the conquered race, 
discovered that the classic mother-tongue of Northern 
Hindostan was the elder sister of the Greek, the Latin, 
the German, and the Celtic languages. At the same 
time a splendid literature was unearthed, which filled 
the scholars of Europe with astonishment and delight. 
The despised Asiatics became not only the blood-rela- 
tions, but the teachers and exemplars, of their con- 
querors. The revulsion of feeling on both sides was 
immense. Mutual esteem and confidence, to a large 
extent, took the place of repulsion and distrust. Even 
in the mutiny which occurred while the change was 
yet in progress, a very large proportion of the native 
princes and people refused to take part in the out- 
break. Since that time, good-will has steadily grown 


42 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


with the fellowship of common studies and aims. It 
may freely be affirmed, at this day, that ¢he discovery 
of the Sanskrit language and literature has been of more 
value to England in the retention and increase of her In- 
dian Empire, than an army of a hundred thousand men.” 

This is but one out of many lessons which the Sci- 
ence of Language has taught us. We have become 
familiarised with many of these lessons, and are apt to 
forget that not more than fifty years ago they were 
scouted as absurd by the majority of classical scholars, 
while they have proved to be the discovery of a new 
world, or, if you like, the recovery of an old world. 

But there are many more lessons which that science 
has still in store for us. There is still much gold and 
silver to be raised by patient labor from the mines that 
have been opened. What is wanted are patient and 
honest laborers, and it is in the hope of gaining fresh 
recruits that I have ventured to invite you to listen to 
my pleading. 


Bld Lr Ga) RB 


THOUGHT THICKER THAN BLOOD. 


HAVE been asked the question, a very natural 
question, and one that has often been discussed 
since the discovery of Sanskrit and since the establish- 
ment of aclose relationship between Sanskrit, Per- 
sian, Greek, Latin, Russian, German, English, and 
Welsh—Does the close relationship of these languages 
prove a real relationship between the people who speak 
these languages ? 

At first sight, the answer seems very easy. As a 
negro may learn English and become, as has been the 
case, an English bishop, it would seem as if language 
by itself could hardly be said to prove relationship. 
That being so, I have always, beginning with my very 
first contribution to the Science of Language—my 
letter to Bunsen ‘‘On the Turanian Languages,” pub- 
lished in 1854—I have always, I say, warned against — 
mixing up these two relationships,—the relationship 
of language and the relationship of blood. As these 
warnings, however, have been of very little avail, I 
venture to repeat them once more, and in the very 
words which I used in the year 1854 :— 


‘Much of the confusion of terms and indistinctness of prin- 
ciples, both in ethnology and philology, is due to the combined 


44 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


study of these heterogeneous sciences. Ethnological race and lin- 
guistic race are not commensurate, except in ante-historical times, 
or perhaps at the very dawn of history. With the migrations of 
tribes, their wars, their colonies, their conquests and alliances, 
which, if we may judge from their effects, must have been much 
more violent in the ethnic than ever in the political periods of 
history, it is impossible to imagine that ethnological race and lin- 
guistic race should continue to run parallel. The physiologist 
should therefore pursue his own science, unconcerned about lan- 
guage. Let him see how far the skulls, or the hair, or the color, 
or the skin of different tribes admit of classification ; but to the 
sound of their words his ear should be as deaf as that of the orni- 
thologist must be to the notes of caged birds. If his Caucasian 
race includes nations or individuals speaking Aryan (Greek), Tur- 
anian (Turkish), and Semitic (Hebrew) languages, it is not his 
fault. His system must not be altered in order to suit another 
system. There is a better solution both for his difficulties and for 
those of the philologist than mutual compromise. The philologist 
should collect his evidence, arrange his classes, divide and com- 
bine, as if no Blumenbach had ever looked at skulls, as if no 
Camper had ever measured facial angles, as if no Owen had ex- 
amined the basis of acranium. His evidence is the evidence of 
language, and nothing else; this he must follow, even though it 
were in the teeth of history, physical or political. Would he 
scruple to call the language of England Teutonic, and class it with 
the Low-German dialects, because the physiologist could tell him 
that the skull, the bodily habitat of such language, is of a Celtic 
type, or because the genealogist can prove that the arms of the 
family conversing in this idiom are of Norman origin? With the 
philologist English is Teutonic, and nothing but Teutonic. Ethno- 
logical suggestions as to an early substratum of Celtic inhabitants 
in Britain, or historical information as to a Norman conquest, will 
always be thankfully received by the philologist; but if every 
record were burnt, and every skull pulverised, the spoken language 
of the present day alone would enable the philologist to say that 
English, as well as Dutch and Frisian, belongs to the Low-Ger- 
man branch—that this branch, together with the High-German 
and Scandinavian, belongs to the Teutonic stock, and that this 
stock, together with the Celtic, Slavonic, Hellenic, Italic, Iranic, 
and Indic, belongs to the Aryan family. .. . 

‘«There ought to be no compromise of any sort between ethno- 


THIRD LECTURE, 45 


logical and philological science. It is only by stating the glaring 
contradictions between the two sciences that truth can be elicited. 

. Ever since Blumenbach tried to establish his five races of men 
(Caucasian, Mongolian, American, Ethiopian, and Malay), which 
Cuvier reduced to three (Caucasian, Ethiopian, and Mongolian), 
while Prichard raised’ them to seven (Iranian, Turanian, Ameri- 
can, Hottentots, Negroes, Papuas, and Alfourous), it was felt that 
these physiological classifications could not be brought to harmo- 
nise with the evidence of language. .... This point was never 
urged with sufficient strength till at last Humboldt, in his Aosmos 
(1., 353), stated it as a plain fact, that, even from a physiological 
point of view, it is impossible to recognise in the groups of Blu- 
menbach any true typical distinction, any general and consistent 
natural principle. From a physiological point of view, we may 
speak of varieties of man,—no longer of races, if that term is to 
mean more than variety. Physiologically the unity of the human 
species is a fact established as firmly as the unity of any other 
animal species. So much then, but no more, the philologist should 
, learn from the physiologist. He should know that in the present 
state of physiological science it is impossible to admit more than 
one beginning of the human race. He should bear in mind that 
Man is a species, created once, and divided in none of its varieties 
by specific distinctions; in fact, that the common origin of the 
Negro and the Greek apt of as little doubt as that of the poodle 
and the greyhound. . 


I have made this long extract from a book written 
by me in 1854, because it will show how strongly I 
have always deprecated the mixing up of Ethnology 
and Philology, and likewise that I was a Darwinian 
long before Darwin. At that time, however, I still 
entertained a hope that the physiologist might succeed 
in framing a real classification of races, on the evidence 
of skulls, or the skin, or the hair, as the philologist has 
succeeded in framing a real classification of languages, 
on the evidence of grammar. But in this hope we 
have been disappointed. Mankind has proved ob- 
streperous ; it has not allowed itself to be classified. 
According to Darwin, all men form but one species, 


46 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


and to his mind that species overlaps even the limits 
usually assigned to mankind. So far there seems to be 
at present a general agreement among physiologists. 
But all further attempts at classifying the human spe- 
cies have signally failed. Some biologists (Virey) have 
proposed two classes; Cuvier proposed three, Lin- 
naeus four, Blumenbach five, Buffon six, Prichard and 
Peschel seven, Agassiz eight, Pickering eleven, Fried- 
rich Miller twelve, Bory de St. Vincent fifteen, Mor- 
ton twenty-two, Crawford sixty, and Burke sixty-three.! 
This does not prove that all these classifications are 
wrong. One of them may possibly hereafter be proved 
to be right. But at present not only is there the most 
decided disagreement among the most eminent biolo- 
gists, but some of them, and these men of high author- 
ity in biological science, have themselves given up 
the whole problem of classifying mankind on physio- 
logical grounds as utterly hopeless. Oscar Peschel, 
in his classical work, Zhe Races of Man and Their Geo- 
graphical Distribution, sams up his conclusions in the 
following words: ‘‘We must needs confess that nei- 
ther the shape of the skull nor any other portion of 
the skeleton has afforded distinguishing marks of the 
human races; that the color of the skin likewise dis- 
plays only various gradations of darkness; and that 
the hair alone comes to the aid of our systematic at- 
tempts, and even this not always, and never with suf- 
ficient decisiveness. ... Who then can presume to 
talk of the immutability of racial types? To base a 
classification of the human race on the character of 
the hair only, as Haeckel has done, was a hazardous 
venture, and could but end as all other artificial sys- 
tems have ended.”’ 


l Horatio Hale, Race and Language, p. 340, 


THIRD LECTURE. 47 


Nor does Peschel stand alone in this honest confes- 
sion that all classification of the human race based on 
the color of the skin, the texture of the hair, the 
shape of the skull, has completely failed. No one 
has of late done more excellent work in ethnology 
than the indefatigable Director of the American 
Bureau of Ethnology, Major Powell. Yet this is what 
he says!: ‘*There is a science of anthropology, com- 
posed of subsidiary sciences. There is a science of 
sociology, which includes all the institutions of man- 
kind. There is a science of philology, which includes 
the languages of mankind. And there is a science of 
philosophy, which includes the opinions of mankind. 
But there is no science of ethnology, for the attempt 
to classify mankind in groups has failed on every 
hand.” 

The very Nestor among ethnologists, Horatio Hale, 
from whose essay on ‘‘ Race and Language”? I have 
largely quoted, has, after a long life devoted to eth- 
nological and linguistic studies, arrived at exactly the 
same conclusion, and expressed it with the same open- 
ness, that the classification of mankind cannot be 
founded on color, hair, or skull, but must be founded 
on language. 

This is, no doubt, a great collapse. We had all 
been brought up with a belief in a white, a yellow, a 
brown, a red, and a black race; or, if we entered 
more deeply into the subject, we seemed perfectly 
certain of a Caucasian, Mongolian, American, Ethio- 
pian, and Malay race. More recently, the division of 
the human race according to the texture of their hair, 
as proposed by Haeckel and adopted by Friedrich 


1 Sczence, June 24, 1887. 
2 Popular Science Review, January, 1888, 


48 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


Miller in his learned work on Ethnology, was accepted 
by the new school of ethnologists as meeting all objec- 
tions that had been made to former classifications. 
Still, it is far better to confess that no satisfactory 
classification has as yet been discovered, than to 
maintain that hair, color, and shape of skulls have 
proved real criteria of racial distinction. It does not 
follow by any means that further research may not 
bring to light a real divisor of the human race. At 
present, however, color of skin is in conflict with 
shape of skull, and shape of skull is in conflict with 
texture of hair. What we want is a principle of 
division that shall do justice to most, if not to all, the 
essential qualities of the varieties of man, provided 
always that such essential qualities can be discovered. 

Till this is done, I agree with Mr. Horatio Hale 
that the most satisfactory, nay the only possible di- 
vision of the human race, is that which is based on 
language. No one doubts that languages can be 
classified, and that the true principle of classification 
is their grammar. If some languages stand as yet 
apart, which hereafter may be proved to be related, 
or if other languages have not as yet been analysed 
at all, that does not interfere with the enormous area 
of human speech which has been carefully surveyed. 
It is, of course, of that area alone that we can make 
any assertion, and our assertion is that the people 
who speak the same or cognate languages may, nay 
must, be treated as closely related. In modern times 
the frequent intercourse between all the people of the 
world, and the facility with which foreign languages 
may be acquired, are apt to make us look upon lan- 
guage as something, not essential, but purely acciden- 
tal. But that was not the case in ancient times; and 


THIRD LECTURE. 49 


though the acquisition of a foreign language may be 
accidental, language as such is not. It is language 
that makes'‘man. Language is surely more of the es- 
sence of man than his skin, or his color, or his skull, 
or his hair. Blood, flesh, and bone are not of our true 
essence. They are in a constant flux, and change with 
every year, till at last they return to the dust. Our 
body is our uniform, very tight sometimes, very pain- 
ful to don, very painful to doff, but still our uniform 
only. It matters very little whether it is black or 
white. Language, on the contrary, is the very em- 
bodiment of our true self. Take away language, 
and we shall indeed be mere animals, and no more. 
And, besides that, it is language that binds individ- 
uals together into families, clans, and nations, and 
survives them all in its constant growth, thus en- 
abling us to base our classification on general and 
permanent characteristics, and not on peculiarities 
which, for all we know, may be the result of climate, 
diet, and heredity. 

There can be no doubt that in the beginning at all 
events, the members of one family spoke one and the 
same language. When families grew into clans and 
nations, they would continue to speak the same lan- 
guage, and if colonies started from their original 
home, they could not but carry the same language with 
them. 

But it is objected, that in the spreading of nations 
a mixture would necessarily occur between, say, white 
and black tribes. 

No doubt it would, and it is for this very reason 
that physiological classification breaks down, while 
linguistic classification, though it becomes more diffi- 
cult, does not become impossible. After blood has 


50 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


once become mixed, no scientific test has yet been 
discovered for distinguishing its ingredients. No one 
can tell, for instance, whether the offspring of a white 
man and a black woman should be classed as Cauca- 
sian or as Negro. The color may be quite white or 
quite black, or something between the two. The 
nose and mouth may be Negro-like, and yet the 
color may be fair, and the shape of the skull and the 
texture of the hair may be Caucasian. After one or 
two generations certain varieties may either become 
permanent, or they may, by the force of atavism, re- 
turn to their original type. New mixtures of mixed 
or mongrel offspring with other mongrel or with pure 
breeds will make confusion even worse confounded, 
and after hundreds and thousands of years, the very 
possibility of pure breeds may very justly be doubted. 
How then should we dare in our days to classify man- 
kind according to such variable peculiarities as color, 
skull, or hair? 

The case is very different with regard to languages. 
No doubt, while this social intercourse between black 
and white people takes place, the white might adopt 
some words from the black, and the black from the 
white people. But these words could nearly always 
be distinguished, as we are able to distinguish French, 
Latin, and Greek words imbedded in English. And 
there would always remain the criterion of grammar, 
which enables us to say that English is and remains a 
Teutonic language, even though every word in an Eng- 
lish sentence should be, as it often is, of Latin origin. 

Lastly, it should never be forgotten, that if we 
speak of Aryas, we mean no more than the speakers 
of Aryan languages. As to their color, skull, or hair, 
we neither assert nor imply anything, unless we hap- 


THIRD LECTURE. Si 


pen to know it from other sources. We may thus 
use ‘‘languages”’ as a synonym of ‘‘ people,” just as 
Nebuchadnezzar addressed his subjects, ‘‘O people, 
’ It is quite possible—in fact, 
it is almost inevitable in the constant turmoil of 
history—that the same language may come to be 
spoken by the white and the black, or any other variety 
of man. We take that for granted, and we should 
always have to make allowance for it, whenever we 
have to make any assertions as to the physical appear- 
ance of the Aryan or Semitic or Turanian speakers. 
But even then there remains the fact that, whenever 
there is a mixture of language, there is at the same 
time a much greater mixture of blood; and while it is 
possible to analyse mixed language by scientific tests, 
no tests whatever have as yet been discovered for 


nations, and languages.’ 


analysing mixed blood. It would be very hazardous 
to say that hereafter such tests may not be discovered, 
and that a classification of the human race according 
to physiological peculiarities is altogether impossible. 
What I maintain is that all attempts /Aztherto made 
have failed, and that if we want to classify the species 
to which we belong, we can only do it on linguistic 
grounds. 

Much fault has been found with a remark which I 
made many years ago, that the same blood runs in the 
veins of the Sepoy and of the English soldier, that they 
are brothers in blood as well as brothers-in-arms. And 
yet, though it is difficult to prove it in every single 
case, all speaks in favor of supposing that the soldier 
who speaks English and the soldier who speaks Ben- 
gali, must be descended from ancestors who in far dis- 
tant times spoke the same language and shared the 
same blood. There may be Sepoys of Mongolian ori- 


52 _ SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


gin; but though of course I did not mean them, yet the 
probability is that even they, if they have learned to 
speak an Indian vernacular, are descended from an- 
cestors who intermarried with women of Aryan origin. 
As a rule, no tribe, whether conquered or conquering, 
adopts the language of the conquerors or the con- 
quered, and abstains at the same time from inter- 
marriage. And what one single marriage may pro- 
duce can easily be shown. Let there be one couple 
of a black man and a white woman, and suppose they 
have four children, two boys and two girls. Let 
those boys and girls marry outsiders, whatever their 
color may be. Then, if each of these four couples has 
again four children, there would be sixteen mongrels. 
In another twenty years these sixteen might produce 
thirty-two, and in another twenty years these thirty- 
two might have produced a total of sixty-four mon- 
grels. If this process is carried on at the same not 
very extravagant ratio of four children to every couple, 
about six hundred years would suffice to produce a 
population of 2,147,483,648 human beings, all mon- 
grels. This, I believe, is a great deal more than the 
population of the whole earth, which is said to amount 
to no more than 1,400,000,000. If we ask what the 
language of all these people would be, the answer is 
easy. It would be the language of one of their two 
ancestors, and it need not differ from that language 
more than the English of to-day differs from that of 
Robert of Gloucester. But however much it differed, 
we could always discover whether the grammar, the 
lifeblood of their language, was like that of the Ne- 
groes or like that of the Greeks. With regard to 
color, skull, and hair, however, it would be impos- 
sible to hazard any conjecture. If the original white 


THIRD LECTURE. 53 


man and black woman were only varieties of a com- 
mon type, and their color was due to climatic influen- 
ces, their offspring might be neither black nor white, 
but any color—grey, brown, or red. The noses of 
their descendants might be Greek or Negro-like, their 
skulls dolichocephalic or brachycephalic, their hair 
straight, or curled, or tufty. 

It was necessary to enter into this subject more 
fully, because, whether from a dislike of the idea that 
the same blood might run in the veins of the Sepoy 
and of the English soldier, or from some other cause, 
the idea of an Indo-European humanity has often 
been scouted, and our ancestors have been sought for 
in every part of the world rather than somewhere in 
Asia. You will now understand in what sense Indo- 
European speech is equivalent with Indo-European 
race, and how far we are justified with Nebuchadnez- 
zar to use languages as synonymous with nations. 

It may be that the practical usefulness of the lesson 
taught us by the Science of Lauguage, that all Aryas 
do not only speak the same tongue, but are children 
of the same parents, is at present confined to the dark 
inhabitants of India and their fair rulers who came 
from the extreme West of Europe. But in time to 
come the same lesson may revive older and deeper 
sympathies between all Indo-European nations, even 
between those who imagine that they are divided, if 
not by language, at all events by blood. 

The Celts of Ireland are Aryas, and speak to them 
only the language of the Aryan brotherhood, and the 
wild fancies of a separate Fenian blood will soon 
vanish. 

The French are Aryas, and more than that, they 
are, toa very considerable extent, Franks, and their 


54 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


veins are as full of the best Teutonic blood as their 
language is of the best Teutonic speech. Why should 
the French and the Germans not learn again those 
neighborly sentiments which have made the westward 
march of the Aryan brotherhood the triumphal pro- 
gress of true civilisation? 

The Slaves are Aryas, and so far as they are Aryas, 
tillers of the soil, (for that is the original meaning of 
the word,) they have preserved some of the noblest 
features of the Aryan race. Why should they be taught 
to look upon their German neighbors as aliens and 
enemies, when they have so many interests and so 
many duties in common? Why should there be strife 
between their herdmen, when they know that they are 
brethren, and there is land enough for all of them, on 
the right and on the left ? 

These may seem but idle dreams, of little interest 
to the practical politician. All I can say is, I wish it 
were so. But my memory reaches back far enough to 
make me see the real and lasting mischief for which, 
I fear, the Science of Language has been responsible 
for the last fifty years. The ideas of race and nation- 
ality, founded on language, have taken such complete 
possession of the fancy both of the young and the old, 
that all other arguments seem of no avail? 

Why was Italy united? Because the Italian lan- 
guage embodied Italian nationality. Why was Ger- 
many united? Because of Arndt’s song, What is the 
German’s Fatherland ? and the answer given, As far 
as sounds the German tongue. Why is Russia so 
powerful a centre of attraction for the Slavonic inhab- 
itants of Turkey and Germany ? Because the Russian 
language, even though it is hardly understood by Ser- 
vians, Croatians, and Bulgarians, is known to be most 


THIRD LECTURE. 55 


closely allied. Even from the mere cinders of ancient 
dialects, such as Welsh, Gaelic, and Erse, eloquent 
agitators know how to fan a new, sometimes a danger- 
ous, fire. 

But if the Science of Language has encouraged 
these various national aspirations in places even where 
separation and national independence would mean 
political annihilation; if it has called forth a spirit of 
separatism, it has also another lesson to teach, that 
of an older, a higher, a truer brotherhood—a lesson 
too often forgotten, when the opposite lesson seems 
better to answer political ends. As dialects may well 
exist by the side of a national speech, nay, as they form 
a constant supply of life, and vigor, and homely grace 
to the classical language, so imperial rule does not ex- 
clude provincial independence, but may derive from 
the various members of a great empire, if only held 
under proper control, its best strength, its permanent 
health, and that delightful harmony which is the re- 
ward of all true and unselfish statesmanship. 


THE CRADLE OF THE ARYAS. 


And now let us return once more from the present 
and the future to the most distant past. If we are 
all members of the great Aryan brotherhood, the 
question whence the Aryas came, and what was the 
original Aryan home, was a natural and _ legiti- 
mate subject of a scholar’s curiosity. The question 
was asked and answered without much hesitation, 
though, of course, with a clear knowledge that the 
answer could be speculative only. Traditions among 


56 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


the South-Eastern Aryas, the Indians and Persians, 
might point to the North, the legends of North-Wes- 
tern Aryas, the Greeks and Germans, might point to 
the North or the East, as their earthly paradise; but 
such dreams would be of little help in settling events 
supposed to have taken place two, three, it may be four 
or five thousand years before the beginning of our era. 
The only arguments, if arguments they can be called, 
or, we should rather say, the only impressions by 
which scholars were guided in giving a guess at the 
whereabouts of the cradle of the Aryan race, were first 
of all geological, and afterwards semi-historical. Ge- 
ology tells us that the first regions inhabitable by 
human beings were the high plateau of Pamir in the 
Belurtagh, and the chain of the Caucasus between the 
Caspian, the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean. No 
geologist would evex think of any part of Europe as 
inhabited, or inhabitable, at the same period of time 
as these two highest points in Asia. From the same 
high plateau spring the rivers Oxus and Yaxartes, 
which would have served as guides to the West and 
the North-West, and the Indus, which would have 
served as a guide to the South-East; the former lead- 
ing the Indo-European race to Europe, the latter to 
India. 

And when we leave these distant geological per- 
iods, we find again all the beginnings of what we may 
call civilised life in Asia. I say nothing of China, or 
Babylon and Assyria, of Egypt, Phenicia, and Pales- 
tine. Al! these countries were teeming with civilised 
life when, so far as history tells us anything, Europe 
may still have been a sheet of ice, a swamp, or a 
howling wilderness. But if we confine our attention 
to the Aryas, we find them entering the land of the 


THIRD LECTURE. 57 


Seven Rivers, as they called the country of the Pan- 
jab, at a time when Europe had hardly risen above 
the horizon of legend, much less of history. If we 
claimed no more than rooo B. C. as the date of that 
Aryan immigration into India, the language which 
they brought with them presupposes untold centuries 
for its growth. When we proceed to Media and 
Persia, we find there, too, traces of an ancient lan- 
guage and literature, closely allied with that of India; 
and we can watch how in historical times these 
Medes and Persians are brought in contact with an 
even more ancient civilisation in Babylon, in Egypt, 
and in Phenicia. When that Median and Persian 
wave rolls on to Asia Minor, and after the conquest 
of the Ionian settlements there, threatens to over- 
whelm Europe, it is repelled by the Greeks, whose 
civilisation was then of a comparatively recent date. 
And when, after the Persian wars, the. stream of 
Greek civilisation flows westward to Italy, and from 
Italy overflows into Gaul and Germany, sweeping 
everything before it, it meets there with hardly any 
monuments of ancient growth, and with no evidence 
of a language more primitive than Sanskrit, or of a 
literature and religion to be compared for freshness 
and simplicity with the religious literature of the 
Vedic age. 

It might have been intelligible if, under these cir- 
cumstances, the cradle of the Aryan race had been 
sought for in India or Persia, possibly even in Asia 
Minor, in Greece, orin Italy. But to place that cradle 
in the untrodden forests of Germany, or even on the 
shores of the bleak Scandinavian peninsula, would 
seem to have required a courage beyond the reach of 
ordinary mortals. 


58 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


Yet, this feat has been accomplished by some Ger- 
man ethnologists, and the south coast of Sweden has 
actually been singled out as the hive from which the 
Aryas swarmed, not only into Germany, Italy, Greece, 
and Armenia, but into Persia and India likewise. 
Scholars shook their heads and rubbed their eyes, but 
they were told that this counted for nothing, and that 
the least they could do was to prove that Sweden had 
not been the original home of the Aryas. Now, you 
know how difficult it is under all circumstances to 
prove a negative; but in this case it became doubly 
difficult, because there was hardly anything adduced 
that could be disproved. There was no evidence of 
any Aryan people having lived in Sweden much be- 
fore the time when Persia invaded Greece, and when 
the ancient Vedic religion, after a sway of many cen- 
turies, after long periods of growth and decay, was 
already being supplanted by a new religion, by Bud- 
dhism. The statement- quoted as having been made 
by a defender of the Scandinavian theory, that the 
date of the Aryan migration into India was about the 
seventh century, must clearly rest on a misprint, and 
was probably meant for the seventeenth century. For, 
after all, whenever the Aryans started from Scandi- 
navia, they must have been near the Indus about 
1500 B. C., speaking Vedic, and not modern Buddhist 
Sanskrit; they must have been in Greece about 1000 
B. C., speaking the Dorian dialect of the Greek branch 
of the Aryan stock of speech. They must have been 
in Asia Minor, speaking the Ionian dialect of the 
same Greek branch at a time early enough for their 
name of Yavan to be quoted by the author of Genesis, 
for their name of VYauna to be joined with those of 
Media and Armenia as provinces of Persia in the 


THIRD LECTURE. 59 


cuneiform inscriptions of Darius; nay, possibly for the 
same name, under the disguise of Uzwen, being found 
in Egypt in the hieroglyphic inscriptions of the fif- 
teenth century B. C. 

These are facts that have to be accommodated, 
when we are asked to believe that the ancestors of all 
these Aryas came from Sweden, where we know of no 
traces of human life, much less of Aryan life, much 
before these very wars between Persians and Ionians. 
Even then we only find &¢chen-middens and funeral 
barrows, and who is to tell us whether these dcaux restes 
of prehistoric dinners were left by Aryas or by pre- 
Aryan hordes, and whether these silent dolichocepha- 
lic skulls spoke once an Aryan or non-Aryan dialect? 

With all these palpable facts against them it can 
hardly be’supposed that the supporters of the Scan- 
dinavian theory had no arguments at all on their side. 
Yes, they had, but let us see what their strength 
really is. 

It has been said that Latham, who first started 
this theory, pointed out that at present the number of 
Aryas, speaking different Aryan dialects in Europe, is 
much larger than the number of Aryas in Asia, and 
that it would therefore be absurd to derive the major- 
ity from so small a minority. First of all, I doubt 
these linguistic statistics, even at the present day. I 
am not at all certain that the number of people speak- 
ing Aryan dialects in Asia at the present moment is 
smaller than that of Aryan speakers in Europe. But 
at the time of which we are now speaking, say 500 
B. C., when one great period of language, literature, 
and religion had already come to an end in India, the 
population of the North of Europe and of Scandinavia 
was of the scantiest, and even if they were Aryas, and 


60 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


not Basks, or Laps, or Fins, their number would have 
been a mere nothing compared with the enormous 
number of Aryas at that time living in India, and 
Persia, and Asia Minor. How then these Aryas who 
composed their Vedic hymns on the banks of the Seven 
Rivers between 1500 and 1000 B. C., should have 
migrated from Sweden, passes my understanding. 

A stronger argument that has been adduced in 
favor of Sweden being the cradle of the Aryan race, 
is a passage from Jordanes, or Jornandes, as he is 
commonly called. At all events we have here some- 
thing tangible that can be handled, that can be proved 
or disproved. It is said that Jordanes has preserved 
the ancient tradition that Sweden was ‘‘the manu- 
factory of people,” the officina gentium, as he ex- 
pressed it. 

Before we quote an authority, our first duty is to 
find out who he was and what means of knowledge 
he possessed. Now Jordanes lived about 550 A. D. 
He was originally a notary in Bulgaria, and became 
afterwards a monk, possibly in Ravenna. He wrote a 
book De rebus Geticis et De origine actuque Geticae 
gentis, which is chiefly based on a lost work of Cas- 
siodorus, the friend and adviser of Theodoric, on 
Orosius, and on similar authorities. He himself is a 
most ignorant and uncritical writer. Besides that, he 
writes with an object, namely to magnify the Gothic 
race and bring it somehow in connexion with Troy 
and the fabulous ancestors of the Romans.! He cer- 
tainly, whether rightly or wrongly, believed that the 
Gothic and other German tribes among whom he had 
lived on the Danube, came from the north, and from 
Sweden. He therefore called the island of Scancza or 


1 Jordanes, Cap. g, and 20. 


THIRD LECTURE. 61 


Scandza the officina gentium,' the manufactory of peo- 
ples. But by these peoples he clearly understood the 
Teutonic tribes, who had overrun the Roman Empire. 
The idea that other nations, such as Romans, or 
Greeks, or other Aryas could have come from Sweden 
would probably have completely staggered his weak 
mind. 

On such evidence then we are asked to believe 
that tradition had preserved in the year 550 A. D. 
some recollection ‘of the original migration of the 
Aryas from Sweden, say 500 B.C. Poor Jordanes 
himself never dreamt of this, and a theory must 
indeed be very near drowning to grasp at such a 
straw. 

What would the upholders of the Scandinavian 
theory say, if we appealed to the famous legend of 
Odin’s migration from Asia in support of the Asiatic 
origin of the Aryas in Europe? And yet that legend 
meets us only a century later than Jordanes, namely, 
in Fredegar, 650 A. D., and then grows from century 
to century till we find it fully developed in the Heims- 
kringla and the Prose Edda in the thirteenth century, 
nay, believed in by certain scholars of the present 
day. 

If we reason soberly, all we can say is that the 
separation between the South-Eastern branch of the 
Aryan family, the Hindus and Persians, and the 
North-Western branch, the Germans, Celts, Slavs, 
Greeks, and Italians, cannot be proved to have taken 
place in Europe, because at that early time we know 
absolutely nothing of Europe being: inhabitable or in- 
habited by any race, whether Aryan or non-Aryan. 


1Ex hac igitur Scancia insula, quasi officina gentium, aut certe velut 
vagina nationum, cum rege suo Berich Gothi quondam memorantur egressi, 


62 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


The angle from which these two streams of language 
might have started points to Asia, and points to that 
very locality where geologists tell us that human life 
became possible for the first time, the high plateau of 
Pamir, or rather the valleys sloping down from it 
towards the South. 

We can construct a picture of the life of these as 
yet undivided Aryas from the words which the North- 
ern and Southern Aryan languages share in common, 
and all the salient features of that picture fit in with 
the picture which recent travellers have given us of 
the neighborhood of Pamir. Let us examine a few 
of them. 

We are told that the climate is cold, the winter 
long, and that there is plenty of ice and snow. We 
should therefore expect that the Aryas, before they 
left that neighborhood, should have formed names 
for snow and winter, and that these names should 
have been preserved in both branches of the Aryan 
family. And soitis. We find in Sanskrit the same 
words for szow and winter as in Greek, Latin, and 
German. This proves at all events that the original 
home of the Aryan language could not have been in a 
tropical climate, for there snow and ice being un- 
known, names for snow and ice would not be wanted. 

Snow is szzzh in ancient Persian, szazvs in German, 
ax in Latin. Winter was héman in Sanskrit, yeiua* 
in Greek, Azems in Latin, zzma in Slavonic. Jce is 
isi in Zend, zs in Old High-German. 

The most common trees in Northern Kohistan are 
the pine, the birch; and the oak. One of these trees, 
the birch, has the same name in Sanskrit and in Eng- 
lish. Szrchin English is bhtirga in Sanskrit. The 
names of the other trees exist in the South and the 


THIRD LECTURE. 63 


North, and must therefore have been known before 
the Aryan separation; but their meaning varies. The 
word which in Sanskrit is used for tree and wood in 
general, dru, appears’in Greek as dpts, meaning 
tree, but especially the oak. In German ¢77u is like- 
wise used for tree in general, but in Celtic daur means 
the oak, while in Lituanian derva has become the 
special name for fir. We see a similar change of 
meanings in another name for va&, the Latin guercus. 
The same word appears in Lombardian as fereha, and 
in the A. S. furh, the English fir. The dcech has not 
a common name in Sanskrit and Greek, whatever the 
defenders of the Scandinavian theory may say to the 
contrary. They mistook the name of the birch for 
that of the beech, and, more than that, they assigned 
a wrong /adztat to the beech. 

One of the strongest, if not the strongest argument 
against the Asiatic origin of the Aryas has always 
been that there are no common Aryan names for lion, 
and tiger, and camel in their ancient language, while 
there are common names for swine, sheep, ox, dog, 
and horse. First of all, this reasoning is not correct. 
We may safely conclude, when we find the same 
words in Sanskrit on one side and in Greek and Latin 
on the other, that these words existed before these 
languages separated, and that therefore the objects 
signified were known. But we cannot conclude with 
the same safety that because the same words do nod 
exist in these languages, therefore the objects signi- 
fied by them could not have been known. Words are 
constantly lost and replaced. It does not follow, for 
instance, that the Aryas, before they separated, were 
ignorant of the use of fire, because the Sanskrit word 
for fire, agni, is not to be found in Greek. It is re- 


64 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


placed in Greek by zdp, but in Latin the Sanskrit 
word for fire, agni, appears as zgnis. Though the 
positive argument is irresistible, the negative argu- 
ment has always to be used with great caution. But 
the latest traveller in Kohistan, M. de Ujfalvy,! tells 
us that even the zodlogical foundation of this argu- 
ment about lion and tiger is wrong, and that these 
wild beasts are not to be found in those cold regions 
where the home of the Aryas is most likely to have 
been. The fact therefore that the Southern and 
Northern Aryan languages have not the same names 
for lion and tiger, so far from being against us, is in 
perfect harmony with the theory that the original 
home of the Aryas was on the slopes of the mountains 
which form the junction between the Hindukush and 
the Karakorum chains, what may be called Northern 
Kohistan. 

I call it a theory, for I do not see how it can ever 
be more than a theory. It was in order to guard 
against useless controversy that I have always con- 
fined myself to the statement that the Aryan home 
was ‘‘somewhere in Asia.” This has been called a 
vague and unsatisfactory conclusion ;? but all who are 
familiar with these studies know perfectly well what 
it meant. No one would suspect me of deriving the 
Aryas from India, Persia, or Asia Minor, nor from 
Burma, Siam, China, Mongolia, and Siberia, nor from 
Arabia, Babylon, Assyria, or Phenicia. Then what 
remains? Not much more than that high plateau 
from which the Himalaya chain branches off toward 


lExpédition scientifique Francaise en Russie, Sibérie et Turkistan, par 
Ch. E. D. Ujfalvy de Mezé-Kovesd, Paris, 1878. 

2See Horatio Hale, ‘* The Aryans in Science and History,” in 7he Popular 
Science Monthly, for March, 1889, p. 673. 


THIRD LECTURE. 65 


the south-east, the Kuen-liin chain towards the east, 
the Karakorum towards the west, and the Hindukush 
towards the south-west: the region drained by the 
feeders of the Indus, the Oxus, and Yaxartes. That 
is still a sufficiently wide area to accommodate the 
ancestors of our Aryan race, particularly if we remem- 
ber in how short a time the offspring of one single 
pair may grow into millions. 

This question has now been so fully discussed, 
and so splendidly summed up by a Dutch scholar, a 
Jesuit, worthy of the name and fame which that order 
once possessed in literature and science, Van den 
Gheyn,! that I hope we shall hear no more of Sweden 
as the cradle of the Aryas. It would be best, perhaps, 
to accept a proposal made in the interest of peace by 
my learned friend and fellow-worker, Professor Sayce, 
who thinks that he might be able to persuade all eth- 
nologists to use the name Aryan in a purely physio- 
logical sense, and to restrict it to the dolichocephalic 
people, with blue eyes and blonde hair, regardless of 
the language they speak. Whether all people with 
blue eyes and golden hair in Greece and Italy, in the 
Caucasus, in Persia, and in Central Asia, have come 
from Scandinavia, ethnologists would then have to 
settle among themselves; but we should at all events 
have peace within our borders. Aryan is a mere ad- 
jective, which we could well spare. We should then 
retain the old classical name of Arya for those people 
who brought the numerous varieties of Aryan speech 
from Asia to Europe, whose thought still runs in our 
thoughts, as their blood may run in our veins—our 
true ancestors in spirit and in truth, whether their 
heads were long, their eyes blue, and their hair golden, 


1L’ Origine européenne des Aryas, Paris, 1889. 


66 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


or whether their heads were round, their eyes dark, 
and their hair black. 

And here I must conclude my plea for the Study 
of the Science of Language. I hope I have shown 
you that it really is a disgrace for any human being 
to go through life without some knowledge of what 
language is and what it has done for us. There are 
certain things which are essential to education—not 
only reading, writing, and arithmetic, but a general 
knowledge of the earth on which we live (Geology and 
Geography); of the sky and the stars which tells us of 
infinite law and order above (Astronomy) ; of the great 
men who have made the world what we found it (//zs- 
tory); and of some of the greatest men who have told 
us what this world ought to be (Religion and Philoso- 
phy). add to these the Science of Language which, | 
better than anything else, teaches us what we really 
are. You have only to try to imagine what this world 
would be, if it were inhabited by speechless beings, in 
order to appreciate the full importance of knowing 
what language really is to us, and how much we owe 
to language in all we think, and speak, and do. 

It is quite true that life is too short for any human 
being to gain a thorough knowledge of these funda- 
mental subjects. But life is not too short to allow us 
to gain a sound knowledge of the general outline of 
these subjects, and of the results that have been gar- 
nered up in some of our best school-books and man- 
uals. And this is particularly true with regard to the 
Science of Language. As I said in a former lecture, 
we all can play at least one language, many in these 
days even know two or three. We therefore possess 
the facts; we have only to digest, to classify, and to 
try to understand them. 


THIRD LECTURE. 67 


THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 


It has often been said that no one can know any- 
thing of the Science of Language who does not know 
Sanskrit, and that that is enough to frighten anybody 
away from its study. But, first of all, to learn San- 
skrit in these days is not more difficult than to learn 
Greek or Latin. Secondly, though a knowledge of 
Sanskrit may be essential to every student who wishes 
to do independent work, and really to advance the 
Science of Language, it is not so for those who simply 
wish to learn what has been hitherto discovered. It 
was necessary for those who laid the foundations of 
our Science to study as many languages as possible, 
in order to find out their general relationship. Men 
like Bopp and Pott had to acquire some knowledge of 
Sanskrit, Zend, Gothic, Lituanian, Old Slavonic, Cel- 
tic, Armenian, Georgian, Ossetian, Hebrew, Arabic, 
and Ethiopian, to say nothing of languages outside 
the pale of the Aryan and the Semitic families. Their 
work in consequence was often rough, and it could 
hardly have been otherwise. When that rough work 
had been done, it was easy enough to proceed to 
more minute and special work. But it seems unfair, 
if not absurd, to find faults with pioneers like Bopp 
and Pott, because some of their views have been 
proved to be mistaken, or because they exaggerated 
the importance of Sanskrit for a successful study of 
Comparative Philology. Without Sanskrit we should 
never have had a Science of Language; that seems 
admitted even by the extreme Left. After the study 
of Sanskrit had once led to the discovery of a new 


68 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


world, it was but natural that the land should be di- 
vided and sub-divided, and that each scholar should 
cultivate his own special field. Thus Grimm chose 
the German languages for his special domain, Mick- 
losich the Slavonic, Zeuss the Celtic, Curtius Greek, 
Corssen Latin. There came, in fact, a reaction, and 
we were told at last that Sanskrit had nothing more 
to teach us. Not long ago Manchester, which has 
taken the lead in so many important movements, in- 
formed the world through the Zimes that the long- 
planned revolution had at last been successful, that 
Sanskrit was dethroned, that its ministers had been 
guillotined, and a new claimant had been installed, 
who had been in hiding in Finland. The Aryan lan- 
guage was a mere bastard of Finnish! However, when 
the real sources of this information had been discov- 
ered, the panic soon came to an end, and scholars 
worked on quietly as before, each in his own smaller 
or larger field, unconcerned about the pronunciamentos 
of the Manchester or any other new school. If the 
rebellion meant no more than that Sanskrit had been 
shown to be the elder sister only, and not the mother 
of the other Aryan languages, then I am afraid that I 
myself must be counted among the oldest rebels. If it 
meant that the students of Comparative Philology 
could henceforth dispense altogether with a knowledge 
of Sanskrit, then I feel sure that by this time the mis- 
take has been found out, and Sanskrit has been re- 
stored to its legitimate throne, as prima inter pares 
among the members of the Aryan republic. 

It used to be said for a time that even the A BC 
of Sanskrit was extremely deficient and misleading, 
and that the system of the Aryan vowels in particular 
was far more perfect in Greek and German than in 


THIRD LECTURE. 69 


Sanskrit. Sanskrit, we were told, has written signs 
for the three short vowels only, @, 7, “, not for short 
é and 6. It was declared to be a very great blemish 
that the two vowels 2 and 0, which existed in the 
primitive Aryan speech, had been lost in Sanskrit. 
If, however, they were lost in Sanskrit, that, accord- 
ing to the laws of logic, would seem to show that San- 
skrit also formerly possessed them, and possibly found 
that it could do without them. The same spirit of a 
wise economy may be observed in the historical pro- 
gress of every language. 

But it has now been recognised that, from a gram- 
matical point of view, the Sanskrit system of vowels is 
really far more true than that of Greek, German, or 
any other Aryan language. It seems to me altogether 
wrong, whatever the highest authorities may say to 
the contrary, to maintain that the Aryan languages 
began with five, and not with four short vowels. 

The Aryan languages possessed from the begin- 
ning no more than the well-known four fundamental 
vowels, namely 7, w, the invariable a, and the variable 
vowel, which changes between ¢, o, and rarely a. 
There are ever so many roots which differ from each 
other by having either a, z, wv, or that fourth variable 
sound; there are no roots that differ in meaning by 
having either a, ¢, or oas their radical. Hence (a) 
€, oO represent one fundamental vowel only; they are 
grammatical variations of one common type.! 

If we represent roots, as in Hebrew, by their con- 
sonants only, then we have in the Aryan languages a 
root consisting of D and H. With the radical vowel 
z, that root DIH means to knead, with the radical 
vowel wz the root DUH means to milk. With the 


1] use a for the invariable a; @, &, 0, for the variable vowel. 


7O SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


third or variable vowel, the root DaH means to burn, 
and it may appear in certain grammatical derivations 
as DaH, DéeH, or DoH. We never find a root DaH 
by the side ofa root DeéH, or a root DéH by the side 
of the root DoH. What we find, and what has not 
yet been explained, is that certain roots show a de- 
cided predilection for ¢ or for o. 

Here then we see how right Sanskrit grammarians 
were in admitting only four, and not five fundamental 
vowels, though it might have been better if they had 
in writing also distinguished between the invariable 
a of AG, and the variable a of BHaR. Whether the 
variable vowel was in Sanskrit also pronounced differ- 
ently in different grammatical forms, we cannot tell, 
because in Sanskrit that variable vowel in the body 
of a word is never written. There are indications, 
however, in the changes produced in preceding con- 
sonants, which seem to speak in favor of such a 
view. 

And nowhere has the importance of a knowledge 
of Sanskrit been shown more clearly than in the ex- 
planation of these very vowel-changes, in Greek and 
German. Why the variable vowel appears as a, &, 0 
or disappears altogether, why the second and third 
radical vowels are weakened or strengthened in the 
Same way, remained a perfect mystery, till the key 
was found in the system of accentuation, preserved in 
the Vedic Sanskrit, and nowhere else.! 

But although in’ this, as in many other cases, 
Sanskrit betrays more of the ancient secrets of lan- 
guage than Greek or Latin or German, there is plenty 


1Udatta in Sanskrit means high, anudatta not-high. Originally the 
ud4tta syllable represented what we now call Hochstufe, the anudAatta 
Tiefstufe, at least during the period when accent meant as yet musical pitch 
only. 


THIRD LECTURE. Fe 


of work, and most important work, to be done in 
every language, nay in every dialect, for which we 
want no direct aid from Sanskrit. Some of the most 
brilliant discoveries in the Science of Language have 
lately been made by students of Teutonic philology. 
The work begun in that sphere by Grimm and Scherer 
has been carried on without any flagging by Fick, 
Schmidt, Sievers, Osthoff, Collitz, Brugmann and 
others in Germany, by De Saussure in France, by 
Ascoli and Merlo in Italy. The same work has been 
taken up with renewed ardor in England, where Ellis, 
Morris, Sweet, Skeat, Napier, Douse, and others have 
done most excellent work, and made valuable addi- 
tions to our inherited stock of knowledge. 

Many more laborers, however, are wanted to culti- 
vate this field of English scholarship. Thousands, as 
you know, have come forward to gather honey and 
bring it into the beehive at Oxford, where a Diction- 
ary of the English Language is prepared which, when 
finished, need not fear comparison with the diction- 
aries of either Grimm or Littré. But there is much 
more work to be done in which other thousands might 
help, such as collecting spoken dialects, watching 
local pronunciation, gathering old proverbs, writing 
down with phonetic accuracy popular stories and 
poems, as repeated by old grannies and young chil- 
dren. If among some of my hearers to-day I have suc- 
ceeded in raising an interest in language in general, 
and in kindling a love for their own language in par- 
ticular, and if that interest and love will bear fruit, 
however small,—but nothing is too small in the eyes 
of a conscientious scholar,—then I shall feel amply 
rewarded for having stayed here to attend your Meet- 


OF 


he educational system of our 
THE ARYAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES. 
North-Western Division 


in t 


SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 
GENEALOGICAL TABLE 


- 


institution 


country. 


Division - 


ing, which, I hope, may henceforth become a perma- 
South-Eastern 


72 
nent 


Depemg 
qo oe) ies ae ; e[OOT 
OvlABuIpuBg { : ’ . : BaATO. x 
: *  yavurgegq 
ojuosnsy, uoreg PIO * (yonneqaat.d) kavaiop 30 UPON 
UeIeuy ae : . paws 
AVULIO£)- oT (Qeraoodesy -moT) yung Lacie aa oe UP ee FS 4 ee OH 
“oe ie. ye 2 ee mt a 
ommop - + % F » & P a 
ovaueg-qar uemiep-q3H PIO PUB OIPPYN © oo: Ff Us ne 
ariqejog : . ? . 
oTMOABTS 180 4 : u * (8q10g pus ence Ml epee 
avmeqog pig °* } . (deryeao[g) wrmeyog 
SF ae te gate * pavjog 
. (aeyBoip ‘uBla 
convene oTmoatTg =105 es ie jo avjueao[s) BATT 
eS IEA-TINOg | (aeIsENYy OYA ‘OL99TT] ‘worH) vseny 
OMOABTE [PON SEISE]90q + euieding 
man} 411207) wdoary pay ape. 
omer { Cost PO aes tee onttier } 
ormo] ‘oN0V : ‘ 
ice { omoey ‘o110g } Maroy ; va! s * 00019 } 
Ces ee ae, erueqry 
: NS ots eee Cu0aT is 
MW a ‘  efueurnyy’ 
orreqy whined { 1O.p endaey sees : asa 
AI: mye f gv8ma onday] che Coan), tio he at teaeertoe 
aweg 90,p ongawy : Z : } 5 : eoede 
i a ' s ' ‘ resin} 10g 
OHIBO Thep a) suonduosny + ‘ ; i RO Steg 
: Sg) eet, eet SUPE JO Of) 
ees oneproof CL POW ee eee tee a: papery 
ey j t Ter} 
queng i) aes ee ener pa 
um { aqwuouly pio °* ‘ SF 88 howgng 
NISMS PIO SY PES eee 8 eel sore: 
Geinenury pO ts eee tears vyuouLTy 
ih ieee aoe Pewee: THAD) 
oraesy OF fF Cugeroneg 
: * ' : ‘ t uyisipany 
puez ‘suondiioguy uvruowetyoy ‘tactyeg ‘tueg § | 8 & 5 * Brtog 
{ ee ae soradt) on 
orpuy . : natyeng edge } 
WARSUVG OmpeA ‘NBA pur rwwyApig—wysueg wepoy © - + + : 
—_e-e—— OOO —1 Jo sooruiq a ao40gg 
Sassvip SaHouveg SAOVNONVT avag SdOVOONV'T ONIAIT 


MYeRREDEGESSORS2 


N writing my book, On the Science of Thought,” my 
chief object was to collect all the facts which 
seemed to me to bear on the identity of language and 
thought. I sifted them, and tried to show in what 
direction their evidence pointed. But, as I imagined 
myself as addressing a very small special jury, it 
seemed to me unnecessary, and almost disrespectful, 
to bring any pressure to bear on them, except the 
pressure inherent in facts. I therefore did not avail 
myself as fully as I might otherwise have done, of the 
many witnesses that I could have brought into court 
to support by their authority the truth of the theory 
which I propounded. I mentioned, indeed, their 
names, but I did not call upon them to speak for me 
or for themselves. The fact is, that I did not expect 
that public opinion at large could, at the present mo- 
ment, be very much interested in a question which 
had been discussed many times before, but which, as 
far as I could see, was by nearly all living philosophers, 


1 Reprinted with the consent of publishers and author from the Conxtempo- 
rary Review, Vol. LIV. 


2The Science of Thought, Longmans & Co., 1887. Three Introductory Lec- 
tures on the Science of Thought, delivered at the Royal Institution, with an 
Appendix, which contains a Correspondence on ‘‘ Thought Without Words,’ 
between F, Max Miller, Francis Galton, the Duke of Argyll, George J. Ro- 
manes, and others. The Open Court Pub. Co., Chicago, Ill., and Longmans 
& Co., London, 1888, 


74 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


particularly by those in this country, answered in a 
direction diametrically opposed to that which I, follow- 
ing the lead of the greatest philosophers of -antiquity, 
of the middle ages, and of more modern times, con- 
sidered the right one. I know how long I myself liv- 
ing under the influence of prevailing systems of phi- 
losophy, had hesitated to give up the old belief that 
language is a product of thought; that thought must 
always come first, language after; that thought is in- 
dependent of language, and that the Greeks were 
great bunglers when they.called language and thought 
by one and the same name, Logos. A long life, de- 
voted to the study of philology and philosophy, was 
necessary before I could free myself of the old words 
—that is, the old thoughts—and cease to treat language 
as one thing and thought as another. Much astro- 
nomical observation was required before people could 
persuade themselves that their evening star was the 
same as their morning star,! and much linguistic ob- 
servation will have to be performed before anybody 
will see clearly that our language is really our thought 
and our thought our language. 

But though I was quite prepared that the verdict 
of living philosophers would, for the present at least, 
be adverse to my theory, I was not prepared to find 
nearly all my critics under the impression that this 
theory of the identity of thought and language was 
quite a novel theory, something quite unheard of—in 
fact, a mere paradox. This showed the same want of 
historical knowledge and tact which surprised so many 
philosophers in Germany and France at the time of 
the first appearance of Darwin’s book Ox the Origin 
of Species. Most of the leading reviews in England 


1See, however, Hibbert Lectures, by Sayce, pp. 258, 264. 


MY PREDECESSORS. 7s. 


seemed to consider the theory of evolution as some- 
thing quite novel, as a kind of scientific heresy, and 
they held Darwin personally responsible for it, whether 
for good or for evil. Darwin himself had at last to 
protest against this misapprehension, to point out the 
long succession of the advocates of evolution, from 
Lucretius to Lamarck and Oken, and to claim for 
himself what he really cared for, a legitimate place in 
the historical evolution of the theory of evolution. 

In Germany and France the doctrine of the iden- 
tity of language and thought has at once been recog- 
nised as an old friend, as a theory that had almost 
been battered to pieces in former historical conflicts, 
but which, like the theory of evolution, might well 
claim for itself a new hearing on account of the im- 
mense accumulation of new material, chiefly due to 
the study of the Science of Language during the pres- 
ent and the past generations. I myself, so far from 
pretending to propound a new. philosophy, thought it 
right to point out how some of the greatest philoso- 
phers have held to the same theory, though without 
being able to support it by the important evidence 
supplied by the study of comparative philology, or to 
perceive quite clearly all the consequences which must 
flow from it. It seemed certainly strange that a theory 
which was, to mention more recent philosophers only, 
accepted without any misgivings by such men as Her- 
der,! Schleiermacher, W. von Humboldt, Schelling, 
and Hegel, in Germany; by Hobbes, Archbishop 
Whately, and Mansel, in England; by Abelard, De 
Bonald, De Maistre, and Taine, in France; and by 
Rosmini in Italy, should have been treated as a com- 
plete novelty, or as a mere philological mare’s nest, 


1 Science of Thought, pp. 30, 129. 


76 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


by men who stand in the foremost ranks of philosophers 
in England. What should we say if our best scien- 
tific reviews shrank from the theory of the homogeneity 
of light, heat, and magnetism as an unheard-of nov- 
elty, or as a mere scientific paradox? But such has 
nevertheless been the attitude of some of the best phil- 
osophical journals in England, in discussing, or rather 
in declining to discuss, the identity of language and 
thought, which in my Sczence of Thought I tried to 
support, chiefly by the evidence brought together dur- 
ing the last fifty years by the Science of Language. 

It may be useful, therefore, to look back, in order 
to see what form our problem had assumed before the 
Science of Language had thrown new light upon it. 
In France this problem of the identity of language 
and thought has always remained on the order of the 
day. The controversy between Nominalism and Re- 
alism has left there a far deeper impression than in 
England, and it has not been forgotten that one of 
the principal tenets of the Nominalists was that our 
knowledge of universals consisted entirely in words. 
It was Condillac (1715-1780) and his school in the 
last century who gave new life to this old controversy, 
though his well-known dictum, Vous ne pensons gu’ avec 
les mots, went certainly beyond the point which had 
been reached by the older Nominalists.! The question 
is what he meant by fenser, and if penser meant, as it 
does according to Condillac, no more than sen¢ir, it 
would not be difficult to prove that not only sensation, 
but also imagination, can take place without language. 

1‘*Qu’est ce au fond que la réalité qu’une idée abstraite et générale a 
dans notre esprit? Cen’est qu’unnom ... Les idées abstraites ne sont donc 
que des dénominations . . . Si nous n’avions point de dénominations, nous 


n’aurions point d’idées abstraites, nous n'aurions ni genres ni espéces, nous 
ne pourrions raisonner sur rien.’’ (Condiliac, Zogzgue, Ime. partie, Chap. V.) 


MY PREDECESSORS. aig 


We must define what we mean by thought before we 
can understand its identity with language. It was 
Rousseau (1712-1778) who at once perceived the weak 
point in Condillac’s statement. He saw that, if we 
used the name of thought for all mental work, we 
ought to distinguish between at least two kinds of 
thought, thought in images, and thought in words. 
As a poet and as a dreamer Rousseau was naturally 
aware how often we are satisfied with images; that is 
to say, how often we indulge in mere imagination and 
call it thinking. And though it is quite true that with 
us who are so saturated with language there are few 
images which on closer examination turn out to be 
really anonymous, yet we cannot deny the possibility 
of such mental activity, and are bound to admit it, 
particularly in the earlier periods of the development 
of the human mind. It is this kind of thought which 
has been often claimed for animals also.1 Rousseau 
therefore remarks very justly, Lorsgue ’ imagination s’ar- 
réte, Vesprit ne marche qwia Laide du discours, ‘*When 
imagination stops, the mind does not advance, except 
by means of language.’” 

But, even supposing that our modern philosophers 
should treat Condillac and Rousseau as ancient and 
forgotten worthies, surely they must have heard of 


1De Bonald, De ? Origine du Langage, p. 67: ‘‘ Les brutes, qui éprouvent 
les mémes besoins, regoivent aussi les images des objets que l’instinct de 
leur conservation les porte 4 fuir ou 4 chercher, et n’ont besoin de langage, 
L’ enfant, qui ne parle pas encore, le muet qui ne parlera jamais, se font aussi 
des images des choses sensibles, et la parole nécessaire pour la vie morale et 
idéale, ne l’est pas du tout 4 la vie physique.’’ 


2De Bonald, loc. czt. ,p. 65, remarks: ‘‘ Ce qui veut dire qu'on ne peut pen 
ser qu’au moyen de paroles, lorsqu’on ne pense pas au moyen d’images.’ 
Haller expressed almost the same idea, when he said: ‘‘Ita assuevit anima 
signis uti, ut mera per signa cogitet ac sonorum vestigia sola omnium rerum 
repraesentationes animae ofterant, rarioribus exemplis exceptis, quando 
affectus aliquis imaginem ipsam revocat.”’ 


78 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


Dugald Stewart in Scotland (1753-1828), of De Bonald 
(1754-1840) and De Maistre (1754-1821) in France. 
Now, Dugald Stewart was not ashamed to teach what 
the Nominalists had taught before him—namely, that, 
for the purpose of thinking three things are necessary: 
universalia, genera, and words. If Dugald Stewart had 
not persuaded himself that Sanskrit was a mere forgery 
of the Brahmans, he might have learned a new lesson 
—namely, that all our words, even those which we 
call singular, are derived from general concepts, in 
so far as they must be traced back to roots embodying 
general concepts. This discovery, however, was re- 
served for later comers. In the meantime, men like 
De Bonald and De Maistre in France did not allow 
the old argument to sleep. But curiously enough, 
while formerly the idea of the identity of thought and 
language was generally defended by philosophers of 
the type of Hobbes, by the supporters of sensualistic 
theories who derive all our knowledge from the im- 
pressions of the senses and their spontaneous associa- 
tions, we have in De Bonald and De Maistre men of 
the very opposite stamp—orthodox, almost mystic 
philosophers, who nevertheless make the identity of 
thought and language the watchword of their philos- 
ophy. It is true that even Bossuet (1627-1704) in- 
clined in the same direction. In his famous treatise, 
De la Connatssance de Dieu et de sot-méme, he allows 
that we can never, or, with the usual proviso of weak- 
kneed philosophers, hardly ever, think of anything 
without its name ,presenting itself to us. But De 
Bonald went far beyond this, as will be seen from the 
following extracts :1— 


1 (uvres de M, de Bonald, Recherches Philosophiques sur les Premiers Ob- 
jets des Connatssances Morales. Paris. 1858, 


MY PREDECESSORS. 79 


In his treatise on the origin of language he says: 
‘«There was geometry in the world before Newton, 
and philosophy before Descartes, but before language 
there was absolutely nothing but bodies and their im- 
ages, because language is the necessary instrument of 
every intellectual operation—nay, the means of every 
moral existence.”! He puts the same idea into more 
powerful, though at first sight somewhat perplexing 
language, when he says: ‘Man thinks his word before 
he speaks his thought, or, in other words, man cannot 
speak his thought without thinking his word.’’? 

De Maistre, who belongs to the same school as De 
Bonald, and whose ultimate conclusions I should feel 
most unwilling to adopt, shows, nevertheless, the same 
clear insight into the nature of language. Thus he 
writes: ‘‘The question of the origin of ideas is the 
same as the question of the origin of language; for 
thought and language are only two magnificent syno- 
nyms. Our intellect cannot think nor know that it 
thinks without speaking, because it must say, ‘I 
know.’ ’’8 

And again: ‘‘It is absolutely the same thing 
whether one asks the definition, the essence, or the 
name of an object!*...In one word, there is no 
word which does not represent an idea, and which is 
not really as correct and as true as the idea, because 
thought and language do not differ essentially, but 
represent the same act of the mind, speaking either 
to himself or to others.’’® 


I LocrelEs. D730 
2Loc. cit., p.64: ‘L’homme pense sa parole avant de parler sa pensée; 
ou autrement, l’homme ne peut fav/er sa pensée sans Zenser sa parole.” 


3Sotrées de St. Pétersbourg, 1., p. 75. 
41 0c, Cte, Vay D> 1352 
5Loc. czt., I., p. 131. 


80 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


I say once more that I am the last person to follow 
these French philosophers to their last conclusions. 
Their object is to show that language, being what it 
is, cannot have been a human invention, but must 
have been a divine revelation.!. I quote them here as 
representative men only, and as showing how familiar 
the idea of the identity of thought and language was 
on the Continent during the first half of our century— 
an idea which, by some of the most prominent philos- 
ophers in England, has been treated as an unheard- 
of paradox. 

Of course it may be said that De Bonald, and De 
Maistre too, are ancient history; that the first half of 
this century was a mistake, and that true and positive 
philosophy dates only from the second half of our 
century. But even then, those who wish to take part 
in the discussion of the great problems of philosophy 
ought to know that the question of the identity of 
language and thought has never to the present day 
been neglected by the leading philosophers of Ger- 
many and France. Let us take one, who has not only 
proved himself most intimately acquainted with the 
most recent schools of philosophical thought in Eng- 
land, but has often been claimed asa disciple of Stuart 
Mill—let us take M. Taine, and what do we find in 
his great work, De //ntelligence, first published in 
1870? Without the slightest hesitation, without any 


1‘* Si l’expression est nécessaire, non-seulement 4 la production de l’idée 
ou 4 sa révélation extérieure, mais encore & sa conception dans notre propre 
esprit; c’est-a-dire, si lidée ne peut étre présenté & notre esprit ni présenté 
a l’esprit des autres que par la parole orale ou €crite: le langage est 2écessaire, 
ou tel que la société n’a pu, dans aucun temps, exister sans le langage, pas 
plus que l'homme n’a pu exister hors de la société. L’homme n’a donc pas 
inventé le langage. ... La nécessité de la révélation primitive du langage a 
été défendue dans /’ Encyclopédie par le savant et vertueux Beauzée. Charles 
Bonnet et Hugh Blair entrent dans le méme sentiment,’’—DrE Bona tp, doc. cit., 
p. 199. 


MY PREDECESSORS. 81 


fear that what he says could sound strange to well- 
schooled philosophical ears, or be taken for mere par- 
adox even by the outside public, he writes :!— 

‘‘What we call a general idea is nothing but a 
name; not the simple sound which vibrates in the air 
and sets our ears in motion, nor the assemblage of 
letters which blacken the paper and touch our eyes— 
not even these letters apprehended mentally, or the 
sound of them mentally rehearsed, but that sound and 
those letters endowed, as we perceive or imagine them, 
with a twofold character, first of producing in us the 
images of individuals belonging to a certain class, and 
of these individuals only; secondly, of reappearing 
every time when an individual of that class, and only 
when an individual of that same class, presents itself 
to our memory or our perception.” 

And again :2— 

‘Hence arise curious illusions. We believe we 
possess, besides our general words, general ideas; we 
distinguish between the idea and the word; the idea 
seems to us a separate act, the word being an auxiliary 
only. We actually compare the idea and the image, 
and we say that the idea performs in another sphere 
the same office in presenting to us general objects 
which the image performs in presenting to us individ- 
uals... Such is the first of our psychological illu- 
sions, and what we call our consciousness swarms 
with them. The false theories arising from them are 
as complicated as they are numerous. They obstruct 
all science, and only when they shall have been swept 
away will science become simple again.” 

I could go on quoting passage after passage from 


1 Loc; cit. 1.5 Ds 35: 
2Loc. czt., I., p. 66. 


82 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


M. Taine’s work, and I may say, with regard to him 
too, that, though accepting his facts, I by no means 
accept all the conclusions he draws from them. | 
agree with him that word and idea are but two names 
for the same thing. I agree with him, when he, like 
Locke, shows the impossibility of animals ever reach- 
ing the intellectual level of language, for the simple 
reason that they cannot reach the level of general 
ideas. But I differ from him when he thinks that the 
origin of language and the original formation of words 
can be explained by watching the way in which a child 
of the present day acquires the use of a language ready 
made, though even here our opinions are by no means 
so far apart as he imagines. We are concerned with 
different problems, but we agree, at all events, as to 
the manner in which these problems ought to be 
treated, not by mere assertion and counter-assertion, 
but by a comprehensive study of facts, and by a care- 
ful examination of the opinions of those who came 
before us. 

The unhistorical treatment of philosophy, for which 
some English philosophers have been of late fre- 
quently, and, I think, justly, reprehended, entails far 
more serious consequences than might be imagined. 
I admit it gives a certain freshness and liveliness to 
philosophical discussions. Completely new ideas, or 
ideas supposed to be new, excite, no doubt, greater 
enthusiasm, and likewise greater surprise and indig- 
nation. But life, nay, even history, would be too short, 
if we were always to begin again where Thales, *Aris- 
totle, or Descartes began, or if the well-known results 
of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason were published to 
the world as the most recent discoveries of synthetic 
philosophy. 


MY PREDECESSORS. 83 


Another inconvenience arising from this unhistori- 
cal treatment of philosophical questions is felt even 
more acutely—namely, that in defending an old theory 
by new arguments we are often supposed to be plead- 
ing our owncause. Darwin, particularly in his earlier 
books, speaks of the cause of evolution, not as if it 
were anything personal to himself, but as a trust 
handed down to him, almost as an heirloom of his 
family ; anyhow, asa valuable inheritance dating from 
the earliest days of awakening physical and philosoph- 
ical inquiry. In his later books he becomes more and 
more self-conscious, and seems restrained from apply- 
ing that rapturous language to the results obtained 
by the theory of evolution which those who follow him 
feel perfectly justified in applying to his and their 
own labors. I have been blamed for speaking with 
unconcealed rapture of the theory of the identity of 
language and thought, and I certainly should feel that 
I deserved blame if this theory had really been of my 
own invention. But, knowing how many of the most 
authoritative philosophers had held the same views, I 
felt at perfect liberty to speak of it, as I did, as the 
most important philosophical truth, in fact, as the 
only solid foundation of all philosophy. 

I also took it for granted, though it seems I ought 
not to have done so, that the misunderstandings which 
had formerly beset this theory, and had been demol- 
ished again and again, would not be repeated with the 
innocent conviction that they had never been thought 
of before. 

Of course, such an expression as identity of thought 
and language can be cavilled at. If Kant is right, no 
two things in space and time can ever be identical, 
and if people really take identical in that sense, the 


84 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


sooner the word is altogether superseded the better. 
When we say that language and thought are identical, 
we mean that they are two names of the same thing 
under two aspects. There is a very useful term in 
Sanskrit philosophy, ‘‘apr7thagbhava” (‘‘the not 
being able to exist apart’’), andit is this, the impossi- 
bility of thought existing apart from language, or lan- 
guage from thought, which we mean when we call the 
two identical. We can distinguish for our own pur- 
poses, and these purposes are perfectly legitimate, be- 
tween the sound and the meaning of a word, just as we 
can distinguish between the pitch and the timbre of 
our voice. But though we can distinguish, we can- 
not separate the two. We cannot have timbre with- 
out pitch, nor pitch without timbre; neither can we 
have words without thought, nor thought without 
words. There never was on one side a collection 
of vocables, mere ffafus vocis, and on the other a 
collection of concepts. The two were always one 
and indivisible, but not one and indistinguishable. 
We can certainly distinguish the sound of a word from 
its meaning, but we must not expect to meet with 
meanings walking about in broad daylight as disem- 
bodied ghosts, or with sounds floating through the air, 
like so many Undines in search of asoul. The two 
were not two, but were one from the beginning, and 
the zpa@rov wevdos lies in this attempted divorce be- 
tween sound and meaning. 

After words have been formed, as embodied 
thoughts, no doubt it is possible to imitate and re- 
peat their sound without knowing their meaning. We 
have only to speak English to a Chinaman, and we 
shall see that what to us is English is to him mere 
sound and jabber. It is no longer language, because 


MY PREDECESSORS, 85 


it is of the essence of language to be sound and mean- 
ing at the same time. 

But then it is asked—Is our thinking always 
speaking? I say, yes it is, if only we take speaking 
in its proper sense. But if we mean by speaking the 
mere vibrations of our vocal chords, then thinking is 
not always speaking, because we can suppress these 
vibrations, and yet keep in our memory the sound 
which they were meant to produce, and the meaning 
which that sound was meant to convey. It is this 
speaking without voice which has come to be called 
thinking, while thinking aloud has monopolised the 
name of speaking. The true definition, in fact, of 
thinking, as commonly understood, is speaking mznus 
voice. And as this kind of thinking is that which is 
most commonly used for intense intellectual work, 
people have become so proud of it that they cannot 
bear to see it what they call degraded to mere speak- 
ing without voice. Still so it is, as every one can dis- 
cover for himself, if he will only ask himself at any 
moment what he is or has been thinking about. He 
can answer this question to himself and to others in 
words only. Nor is there anything degrading in this, 
and, at all events, the greatest philosophical thinkers, 
the Greeks, did not think so, or say so, for they were 
satisfied with one and the same word for thought and 
speech. 

Nor do we really, when we examine ourselves 
carefully, ever detect ourselves as thinking only, or as 
thinking in the abstract. How often have I been 
asked, not whether I think without words, but whether 
I think in English or in German. What does that 
mean? It means, whether I speak to myself in Eng- 
lish or in German, and no more. The idea that I 


86 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


could speak to myself in no language at all is too ab- 
surd to be even suggested. 

The results which the Science of Language has ar- 
rived at, and which are by no means so startling as 
has been supposed, are shortly these :—We have sen- 
sations without language, and some of these sensa- 
tions may produce in men, as well as in animals, in- 
voluntary cries. 

.We have perceptions, or images without language, 
and some of these may be accompanied by gestures 
or signs, such gestures or signs being often intelli- 
gible to others belonging to the same kind. 

We have concepts, but these we can never have 
without words, because it is the word which embodies 
originally one feature only of the whole image, and 
afterwards others, and thus supplies what we call ab- 
stract concepts, to which nothing can ever respond in 
imagination, nothing in sensation, nothing in nature. 

Here it is where the Science of Language has sup- 
plied the historical proof of what would otherwise 
have remained a mere postulate. We know, as a fact, 
that about eight hundred roots will account for nearly 
the whole wealth of the Sanskrit Dictionary. We can 
account for these roots in different ways, the most un- 
objectionable being that suggested by Noiré, that they 
were originally the clamor concomitans of the conscious 
actsofmen. Now, let us take an instance. Man would 
have received the sensation of brightness from the 
stars in the sky, and it is possible, at least I should 
not like to deny it, that animals too might receive the 
Same sensation. After a time, when the same starry 
sky was observed night after night, and year after year, 
the stars as bright points would be remembered, and 
would leave an image of separate sparkling points, 


MY PREDECESSORS. 87 


nay, it may be, of certain very prominent constella- 
tions in our memory. Nor is there any reason to 
doubt that, without any language, the mere image of 
certain constellations appearing on the sky might from 
the earliest times have evoked the images of concom- 
itant events, such as the approach of cold weather, 
or the return of spring, in the minds of our most sav- 
age ancestors. 

But with all that, there was as yet no word, and, 
in consequence, no concept of a star. What we call 
stars, as different from the sky to which they seem 
attached, as different also from sun and moon, were 
as yet bright images only. 

Now, the next decisive step was this. The Aryan 
man possessed what we call roots, sounds which had 
often been used while he and his friends were engaged 
in acts of scattering, dispersing, strewing. One of 
these sounds may have been star. We find it in Latin, 
ster-no and stramen; in Greek, otrop-évvupt; in Gothic, 
strauja; English, to strew, and its many derivatives, 
In all these words, the root, we say, is STAR, though 
we need not assert that such a root ever existed by 
itself before it was realised in all the words which 
sprang from it. One of the features of the bright 
sparkling points in heaven was their scattering or 
strewing sprays of light. By means of the root sTaR 
this one feature was abstracted from the rest of the 
image, and the stars were thus at the same time called 
and conceived as strewers: in Sanskrit, star-as; in 
Greek, aorép-es; in Latin, s/e//ae, i. e. sterulae; in 
English, s¢ars. 

This word s¢ar was not meant for any single star, 
it did not correspond to a sensation, nor to any vague 
image or recollection of stars; it was a name repre- 


88 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


senting one abstract feature of the stars, namely, their 
scattering of light in a dark night. It was man’s own 
creation, and corresponded to nothing in nature, un- 
less it was predicated afterwards of this or that par- 
ticular star. It was so general, in fact, that, as soon 
as special stars had to be named, new determining or 
individualising names became necessary. When it 
was observed that certain stars always retained their 
place, while others travelled about, the former were 
named fixed stars, the latter travellers or planets,? till 
at last every prominent star received some kind of 
name, that is to say, was known and called as different 
from all the rest. 

We see the same process everywhere, though it is 
not always possible to discover with perfect certainty 
what specific features in the objects of nature were 
selected for the purpose of knowing and naming them, 
or, in other words, from what root their names were 
derived. Let us examine the name of ¢ree. Here it is 
quite clear that the most primitive savage must have 
had the sensation produced by trees growing up all 
around him, and giving him shelter against the sun, 
possibly supplying food also to appease his hunger. 
Let us suppose that that sensation was on a level with 
the sensation which animals also receive from trees. 
I do not think it was, but I am willing to grant it for 
argument’s sake. The hundreds and thousands of 
trees which made an impression on the eyes of these 
savages must soon have become indistinguishable, and 
left an image in the memory of a very general and in- 
distinct character. Some philosophers maintain that 
animals also have these blurred images, and that they 


1 Lectures on the Science of Laneuage | Ep yaks 
> S* Pp 


MY PREDECESSORS. 89 


would mistake a post foratree. Again, for argument’s 
sake, I do not mean to contest it. 

But now comes a new step. Men, and men alone, 
in the earliest stages of their life on earth, began to 
take hold of certain trees, tear off their bark, hollow 
out their stems, and use these in the end for making 
beds, boats, and tables, and for other purposes. Con- 
comitant and significative of this act of tearing off the 
bark of trees, the Aryan people had a root DAR; in 
Greek, deipa@; in English, ¢o tear. Being chiefly in- 
terested in trees because they could thus be peeled 
and shaped and rendered useful, they called a tree in 
Sanskrit dru; in Greek, Opts; in Gothic, ¢rzu; in 
English, ¢ree. This was but one out of many names 
that could be applied to trees for various reasons, 
more or less important in the eyes of the Aryan sav- 
ages; and here, even for the sake of argument, I can- 
not bring myself to admit that any animal could have 
done the same. We must bear in mind that there is 
really nothing in nature corresponding to tree. If it 
simply meant what could be shaped, there are hun- 
dreds of things that can in various ways be shaped. 
If it was confined to trees, there are again hundreds 
of trees, oaks, beeches, fir-trees, etc.; but no human 
eye has ever seen a tree, nor could any artist give us 
an idea of what a tree may be as a mere phantasma in | 
the mind of man or animal.! 

If all this is true, it follows that no concept, not 
even the concept of so simple an object as a tree, was 
possible without a name. It was by being named, 
that is, by having one of its prominent features sin- 
gled out or abstracted, and brought under the root 
DAR, to tear, that the blurred image, left on the mem- 


1Taine, De (’ Intelligence, 1., p. 27. 


go SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


ory after repeated sensations, became known, became 
definite, received a handle for the purposes of thought 
and speech. And what was the result? The result 
was that with the name there arose in the mind, not a 
sensation, not an image—for think what such an image 
would have been—but what we call a concept, when 
we speak to ourselves without vibrations of the vocal 
chords, but what is called a word when uttered aloud. 
If we distinguish, therefore, at all between concepts 
and words, we are bound to say that concepts are due 
to words, they are words minus sound, and not, as 
most philosophers will have it, that words are due to 
concepts, that they are concepts f/ws sound. It is only 
because to think aloud is to speak that to speak sotto 
voce may be called to think. All this was perfectly 
known, as far as the general principle is concerned. 
I believe that even Berkeley’s ingenious views of gen- 
eral ideas might easily be translated into our language. 
He maintains that general ideas do not exist at all; 
so do we. He then proceeds to say that what we call 
general ideas are particular ideas with a word attached 
to them. So do we,! only that we have learned how 
this process took place. It could not be done by tak- 
ing a sound at random and attaching it to a particular 
idea, for the simple reason that there were no such 
sounds in the market. But if Berkeley had known 
the results of the Science of Language, he would, I 
believe, have been perfectly satisfied with the process, 
as described before; of bringing one feature of the par- 
ticular idea under a root, and thus raising that particu- 
lar into a general idea at the same time that the root 
was raised into a word. 

We could come to an understanding with Locke 


1 Science of Thought, p. 259. 


MY PREDECESSORS. | gI 


also, when he says that ‘‘words become general by 
being made the signs of general ideas!” if only he 
could be made to see that the same object which he 
has in view can be attained by saying that ideas be- 
come general by being signed with a word. 

Nor should I despair of establishing a perfect 
agreement with M. Taine, if only he would leave the 
modern Parisian nursery and follow me into the dis- 
tant caves of our Aryan ancestors. Nothing can be 
_more brilliant than the way in which he describes the 
process of generalisation going on in the mind of a 
child.2. He describes how the nurse, on showing a 
dog to a child, says owa-oua, how the child’s eyes fol- 
low the nurse’s gestures, how he sees the dog, hears 
his bark, and how, after a few repetitions which form 
his apprenticeship, the two images, that of the dog 
and that of the sound, become, according to the law 
of the association of images, associated permanently 
in his mind. Thus, when he sees the dog again, he 
imagines the same sound, and by a kind of imitative 
instinct he tries to utter the same sound. When the 
dog barks, the child laughs and is enchanted, and he 
feels all the more tempted to pronounce the sound of 
the animal, which strikes him as new, and of which 
he had hitherto heard a human imitation only. Up to 
this point there is nothing original or superior; the 
brain of every mammal is capable of similar associa- 
tions. What is peculiar to man is that the sound as- 
sociated by him with the perception of a certain indi- 
vidual is called forth again, not only by the sight of 
exactly similar individuals, but likewise by the pres- 
ence of distinctly different individuals, though with 


DLOGNC2E sy, Ds 250. 
2 Loc, cit., p. 245. 


g2 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


regard to certain features belonging to the same class. 
In fact, analogies which do not strike an animal, strike 
man. ‘The child says owa-oua at the sight of the dog 
belonging to the house. Soon he says ouwa-oua at the 
sight of poodles, pugs, and Newfoundland dogs. A 
little later the child will say ouwa-oua to a toy dog 
which is made to bark by some kind of mechanism, 
and this no animal would do. Even a toy dog which 
does not bark, but moves on wheels—nay, a dog made 
of bronze, standing motionless and dumb in the draw- 
ing-room, a small friend walking on all fours in the 
nursery, lastly a mere drawing, will evoke the same 
sound. 

All this is true, perfectly true; and M. Taine may 
be quite right in maintaining that the discoveries of 
Oken, Goethe, and Newton are in the end due to the 
same power of discovering analogies in nature. I 
follow him even when he sums up in the following 
words :— 

‘‘To discover relations between most distant objects, to dis- 
entangle most delicate analogies, to establish common features in 
the most dissimilar things, to isolate most abstract qualities, all 
these expressions have the same meaning, and all these operations 
can be traced back to the name being evoked by perceptions and 
representations possessing the slightest resemblances, to the signal 


being roused by an almost imperceptible stimulant, to the mental 
word appearing in court at the first summons.”’ 


With certain restrictions, all these observations 
made among children of the present day apply with 
equal force to the children of our race.! When, for 
instance, such a word as dru, tree, had once been 
formed, supposing that at first it was meant for such 

1See also L. M. Billia, Due Risposte al Prof. Angelo Valdarnini intorno a 


una pretesa contraddizione fra la dottrina tdeologica e la psicologica del Ros- 
mint, Torino, 1887, p. 14. 


MY PREDECESSORS. 93 


trees only as could be peeled and smoothed and fash- 
ioned into some useful tools, it would soon be trans- 
ferred to all trees, whatever their wood. After that, 
it might become specialised again, as we see in Greek, 
where Opvs means chiefly oak, and in Lithunian, 
where it means pine.!' On the other hand, we see a 
word such as oak, after it had taken its definite mean- 
ing, becoming generalised again, and being used in 
Icelandic for trees in general. 

With regard to all this I see no difference between 
M. Taine’s views and my own, and I likewise fully 
agree with him, when he explains how in the end every 
word, before it is used for philosophical purposes, has 
to be carefully defined.? 

There is, however, some new and important light 
which the Science of Language has thrown on this old 
problem, and which, if M. Taine had taken it into 
account, would have enabled him, not only to establish 
his own views more firmly, but to extend them far 
beyond the narrow walls of our modern nurseries. 
The Science of Language has clearly shown that every 
word coincides from the very beginning with a general 
concept. While formerly the admission that thought 
was impossible without words was mostly restricted to 
general and abstract terms, we can now extend it to 
singular terms likewise, in fact, to the whole of our 
language, with the exception of interjections and what 
are called demonstrative elements. That no one could 
think whiteness, goodness, or even humanity or bru- 
tality was generally admitted, even by those who hesi- 
tated to admit that no thought was possible without 
language. But now that we can prove historically 


1 Loe. cit., I., pp; 39, 57- 
2 Biographies of Words, p. 258. 


94 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


that even a tree could not have been named except as 
coming under the general term of tearing, peeling, 
shaping, or, in other cases, of feeding, sheltering, or 
growing, no wavering or haggling is any longer pos- 
sible. All our words are conceptual, all our concepts 
are verbal: this is what Nominalism postulated with- 
out being able to prove it, that is what Nominalism 
has proved by means of the discoveries which a com- 
parative study of languages has placed at our disposal, 
and which no scepticism can touch. From the first, 
Comparative Philology had no such ulterior objects in 
view. It confined itself to a careful collection of facts, 
to the analysis of all that had become purely formal, to 
the discovery of the constituent elements of language, 
to the establishment of the genealogical relationship of 
all members of the same family of speech; but beyond 
this it did not mean to go. When, however, some of 
the results at which Comparative Philology had ar- 
rived quite independently, were found to be almost 
identical with the teachings of some of the most author- 
itative philosophers ; when it was found, for instance, 
that while Locke maintained that animals had no gen- 
eral ideas because they had no words, the Science of 
Language had arrived at the conclusion that animals 
had no words because they had no general ideas,! the 
Science of Language became zfso facto the Science of 
Thought, and language and thought were recognised 
once more as two faces of the same head. 

The consequences which follow by necessity from 
this recognition of the identity of thought and lan- 
guage, and which I was anxious to put forward as 
strongly as possible in my Sczence of Thought, may, no 
doubt, have startled some philosophers whose chief 


lLectures on the Science of Language, \., p. 65. 


MY PREDECESSORS. 95 


strength lies in the undefined use of words. But that 
theory itself could never have startled a careful student 
of the history of philosophy. It is a very old friend 
with a new face, and had a right to expect a different 
reception. 

To the Greeks, we know, it was so natural to look 
upon language and thought as two sides of the same 
thing, that we can hardly appeal to them as conscious 
upholders of suchatheory. As they used /ogos in both 
senses, as discourse, whether internal or external, their 
knowledge of the identity of language and thought came 
to them by intuition rather than by reflexion. They had 
never been led astray as we have been; hence they 
had not to discover the right way. 

Still, whenever Greek philosophers come to touch 
on this question, they speak with no uncertain tone, 
though even then they are generally satisfied with stat- 
ing the truth, without attempting to prove what, in 
their eyes, seemed hardly to require any proof—namely, 
the identity of language and thought. 

In the Sophist, Plato begins by showing how lan- 
guage (Aoyos) may be true or false, and only after 
having proved this, does he proceed to show that 
thought and imagination also may be true or false. 
For, he proceeds, ‘‘thought (dz@voza) is the same as 
language, with this exception, that thought is the con- 
versation of the soul with herself which takes place 
without voice, while the stream which, accompanied 
by sound, flows from thought through the lips, is 
called language (Aoyos).” He then defines opinion 
(60&a) as the result of thinking (dzavoias am orenEv- 
Tno1s), and imagination (pavtacia) as the union of 
opinion and sensation. In this way only, that is, by 
proving that thought, opinion, and imagination are 


g6 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


closely akin to language, does he establish in the end 
that, as language has been proved to be either true or 
false, thought, opinion, and imagination also may be 
true or false. 

Whether Plato could not have established the pos- 
sibility of truth and falsehood in thought, opinion, 
and imagination by a simpler and shorter process, is 
not the question which concerns us here. What con- 
cerns us is the perfect assurance with which he iden- 
tifies here, as well as in the Zheaetetus (190),1 speech 
(Aoyos) and thought (dza@voiw), an assurance which 
seems to be shared by his latest translator, Professor 
Jowett, when finding fault with Hegel because ‘‘he 
speaks as if thought, instead of being identical with 
language, was wholly independent of it.” ? 

Now, therefore, when it will hardly be safe to say 
any longer that the identity of language and thought 
is something quite unheard of, a paradox, a mere per- 
versity (all these expressions have been used by men 
who call themselves philosophers, and even professors 
of philosophy), the next step will probably be to treat 
it as a mere question of words. 

And, indeed, it is a question of words, but in the 
true sense of that word.? 

If we use ¢hought promiscuously for every kind of 
mental process, it stands to reason that to say that 
thought is impossible without language would be ab- 


1‘*What do you mean by thinking ?”’ ‘‘I mean by thinking the conversa- 
tion which the soul holds with herself in thinking of anything. ...I say, then, 
that to form an opinion is to speak, and opinion is a word spoken, I mean, to 
oneself and in silence, not aloud, or to another.’’ 

2 Plato, Vol. IV., p. 420. Hegel, however, said: ‘‘We think in names;’’ 
see Science of Thought, p. 45. 

3‘‘Ein Wortstreit entsteht daraus, weil ich die Sachen unter andern 
Kombinationen sentire und drum, ihre Relativitat ausdriickend, sie anders 
benennen muss.’’—Goethe an Lavater, 1774. 


MY PREDECESSORS. 97 


surd. To feel pain and pleasure is an inward mental 
process, to see and hear are inward mental processes ; 
to stare at the images of present and past events, to 
build castles in the air, to feed on such stuff as dreams 
are made of—all this might certainly be brought under 
the general category of mental activity. For ordinary 
purposes we need not be too particular about lan- 
guage, and, if people like to call all this ¢hzmking, why 
should we object? I, myself, when there can be no 
misunderstanding, use ‘tought in that general sense, 
and use the word mznd for all that is going on within 
us, whether sensation, perception, conception or nam- 
ing.! I did not, therefore, put on my title-page, ‘‘ No 
thought without language,” but ‘‘No reason without 
language,” and I did so after having defined reason as 
the addition and subtraction of conceptual words. 

But though admitting this general meaning of 
thinking, we should carefully distinguish it from its 
more special and technical use, when it becomes syn- 
onymous with reasoning, and is, in fact, speaking sotto 
or senza voce. Whenever there is danger of misap- 
prehension, it is decidedly better to avoid it by defi- 
nition, but in most cases it is quite clear whether to 
think is used in its general or in its special sense. If, 
therefore, it is said that the question of the identity of 
thought and language is a mere question of words, I 
say, Yes, it is; but so is every question of philosophy, 
if rightly understood. Words are terms, and only if 
rightly determined do they enable us to reason rightly. 
Let the word ¢hought be rightly defined, and let the 
word /anguage be rightly defined, and their identity will 
require no further proof; for, when we maintain their 
identity, we do not mean by language mere sound, 


1 Sczence of Thought, p. 20. 


98 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


nor do we mean by thought mere sensation or imagi- 
nation, but knowledge of something that can neither 
be felt nor imagined, and can only be signified. We 
can never see nor can we imagine /ree, dog, man, tri- 
angle, polygon, parallelopiped, and all the rest of our 
dictionary. Then what are ¢ree, dog, man, and all the 
rest? They are names (xomina—gnomina), that is, acts 
of knowledge, and of that peculiar class of knowledge 
which cannot possibly have anything corresponding to 
it in sensuous perception or imagination, because it 
has always reference to something which we discover 
in and lift out from percepts in order to signify whole 
classes of percepts, but never any real and individual 
percept. We can afterwards use these names, and 
say, for instance, this is a tree, this is a dog ; but ¢ree 
and dog, which we thus predicate, are general and ab- 
stract terms; they are not /fe fir-tree or the poodle 
dog which our sensation and imagination present to us. 

I hope that, after this definition of the true mean- 
ing of language and thought, the usual result will fol- 
low, and that my critics will say that, if I meant no 
more than that,no one would think of differing from me, 
and that I have only myself to blame for not having 
made my meaning clear. I am quite willing to take 
that blame so long as I may agree with my adversa- 
ries quickly. If people will only see what ‘‘a question 
of words ”’ really means, I believe there will soon be 
peace among all contending philosophical parties. 

But, unfortunately, we think but too much in words, 
and almost let them think for us, instead of making 
them completely ourown. We take our words as they 
come to us by inheritance, and we trust that other 
people will take them in the same sense in which we 
use them. 


MY PREDECESSORS. 99 


And yet nothing is more certain than that two peo- 
ple hardly ever take the same word in the same sense, 
and that just the most important words are often used 
in entirely different senses by different philosophers. 
Hence all our misunderstandings, all our quarrellings, 
all our so-called systems of philosophy, every one dif- 
fering from the other, and yet all starting from the 
same given facts, all collected by the same eyes and 
the same minds! 

If all philosophers used the same words in the 
same sense, their conclusions would differ as little as 
the conclusions of mathematicians. A mathematician 
knows exactly what is the meaning of the terms with 
which he operates, while philosophers will hardly ever 
condescend to define the terms which they use. We 
wonder why mathematicians always arrive at the same 
results, or, if they do not, why they can always dis- 
cover the mistakes they have made. But how could 
it be otherwise? Even their highest problems, which 
completely stagger the unmathematical mind, consist 
in the end in nothing but addition and subtraction. 
Our reasoning also, even when it reaches the highest 
metaphysical problems, consists in nothing but addi- 
tion and subtraction. What else could it consist in? 
But there is this difference, that, while the mathema- 
tician adds and subtracts values which are defined 
within the strictest limits, the philosopher adds and 
subtracts values which are often not defined at all, or 
defined within the vaguest limits. If the metaphysi- 
cian does not actually play with loaded dice, he often 
uses dice which he has never examined, and which, 
for all he knows, may have been marked rightly or 
wrongly by those who placed them in his hands. If 
all our words were defined as triangles, squares, and 


100 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


spheres are in geometry, or as 1.999 is in arithmetic 
philosophy would soon become a worthy rival of math- 
ematics. 

The only hope of peace and of an understanding 
between various schools of philosophy lies in defini- 
tion, and definition ought at the present moment to be 
the chief employment of all honest philosophers. 

But we want more than definition—we want a 
thorough purification of language. A perfect lan- 
guage ought to be like a perfect alphabet. Asin a 
perfect alphabet the same letter ought always to have 
one and the same sound, and the same sound ought 
always to be represented by one and the same letter, 
so, in a perfect language, the same word ought always 
to have one and the same meaning, and the same 
meaning ought always to be represented by one and 
the same word. I know all poets will cry out against 
this heresy, but I am speaking of philosophical, not of 
poetical, language. 

Languages suffer from wealth even more than from 
poverty. The human mind is so made that it is always 
inclined to presuppose a difference of meaning where 
there is a difference of names. Because we havea 
number of names to signify what is going on within 
us, such as spirit, mind, understanding, intelligence, 
and reason, philosophers have made every kind of ef- 
fort to show how each differs from the rest, till we 
seem to have ever so many pigeon-holes within us, 
and ever so many pigeons hatching their eggs in them, 
instead of one undivided mental activity, applied to 
different objects. 

While here confusion is due to too great a wealth of 
expression, we saw before how the employment of the 
word /anguage in totally different senses, or poverty of 


MY PREDECESSORS. IOI 


expression, played equal havoc with our thoughts. If 
we can speak of the language of the eyes, of the lan- 
guage of silence, of the language of flowers, of the lan- 
guage of animals, no wonder that we forget altogether 
the distinctive meaning of language when used in the 
definite sense of expression of conceptual thought by 
conceptual words. Let this definition of language be 
granted, and ever so many books might have remained 
unwritten. We are all dealing with the same facts 
when we say that animals have no language, while 
others say they have language. We may go on for- 
ever collecting anecdotes of parrots and jackdaws, we 
shall never come to a mutual understanding. But let 
language be once defined, and all wrangling will cease. 
If language is defined as communication in general, 
we shall all agree that animals have language. If lan- 
guage means human language, conceptual language, 
language derived from roots, then we shall all agree 
that animals have no language. 

But it is not only in philosophy that we want a 
katharsis of human speech; it is wanted in every 
sphere of human thought. Think of the different 
meanings attached to the word gentleman. From the 
most opposite quarters, from high and low, you hear 
the expression, ‘‘ He is a gentleman,” or ‘‘He is not 
a gentleman.” If you venture to doubt, or are bold 
enough to ask for a definition of gentleman, you run 
a considerable risk of being told that you are not a 
gentleman yourself if you do not know what gentle- 
man means. Yet the butler will call you a gentleman 
if you give him ten shillings instead of half-a-crown; 
your friends will doubt whether you are a gentleman 
if you indulge in that kind of menial generosity. And 
if there is this haze about the meaning of gentleman, 


102 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


think of the polychromatic iridescence that plays round 
the name of /ady. The best we can do when we are 
asked to define that word is to say that it cannot be 
defined, and that to define means to destroy its charm, 
which can be felt only, but cannot be analysed. 

If you wish to see a real confusion of tongues, you 
need not go to the plain in the land of Shinar, but read 
any article on art in any of our leading reviews. If you 
were to ask for a definition.of almost any word used in 
these reviews, whether nice, sweet, charming, felici- 
tous, exquisite, lovely, heavenly, or realistic, warm, 
throbbing, bewitching, killing, and all the rest, you 
would fare very badly. You would be called a pedant, 
or an ignoramus, and you would require no definition 
of what is meant by ¢/ese words. 

Look for a moment at political language. An emi- 
nent politician has lately spoken in rapturous terms 
about the name of Home Rule. He called it so de- 
lightful a term, so apt, so full of meaning. To others 
it seems the most stupid word that has lately been in- 
vented, and exactly for the same reason—namely, be- 
cause it is so full, so brimful of meaning. Define 
Home Rule, and if we do not all of us become Home 
Rulers at once, we shall at all events be able to com- 
pare notes, to arrive at a mutual understanding, and 
to find out what is practicable and what is not. Every 
individual, every home, every town, every county has 
a right to so much individual liberty, to so much Home 
Rule, to so much municipal freedom, to so much 
county government, as is compatible with the vital in- 
terest of the commonwealth. All individual claims 
that clash with the welfare of the larger communities 
must be surrendered, some for a time, others in per- 
petuity. Home Rule, in its undefined meaning, is 


MY PREDECESSORS. 103 


certainly brimful of meaning, but these words over- 
flowing with meaning are exactly the most bewilder- 
ing and the most misleading terms. Home Rule may 
mean liberty, independence, self-government, and a 
careful regard to local interests. In that sense we are 
all Home Rulers. But it may also mean licence, sedi- 
tion, and selfishness—and in that sense, I hope, the 
number of Home Rulers is very small in the United 
Kingdom of Ireland, Scotland, and England. 

But much more serious consequences may follow 
from a careless use of words. Politics, after all, are 
but a small section of ethics, and we have lately seen a 
complete sytem of ethics built up on the ambiguous 
use of the word good. No doubt, a knife, or a gun, or 
a house may be called good, if they are well adapted 
to cut, to shoot, and to shelter. We may also speak 
of actions as good or bad, not in a moral sense, but 
simply as answering their purpose. A shot, for in- 
stance, may be called a good shot, if it is well aimed 
and well delivered, even though it should be the shot 
of amurderer. The first arrow which Wilham Tell 
let fly at the apple on the head of his son was a good 
shot, but there was no moral element in it, because the 
father acted under constraint. But if he had wounded 
his son, and then, as he intended, had shot the second 
arrow at Gessler, that might likewise have been a good 
shot, in one sense, but, from a moral point of view, it 
would have been murder. 

But to say that moral actions also are called good 
or bad, according as the adjustments of acts to ends 
are or are not efficient, is mere jugglery with words. 
Good has two meanings, and these two meanings 
should be kept carefully apart. Good may mean use- 
ful, but good also means what is anything but use- 


104 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


ful or profitable ; and it is goodness in that sense which 
moral philosophy has to account for. It is quite open 
to any philosopher to say that nothing should be called 
good except what is in some sense or other useful. 
But in that case the meaning of usefulness ought to 
be properly defined ; we ought not to imagine that, 
because we use the same word, we are thinking the 
same thought. Now, how does our utilitarian philos- 
opher define moral usefulness? He maintains that 
as the preservation and prolongation of our own life 
are our swmmum bonum, any acts conducing to this 
should be called good. Here many people would 
question the statement that preservation, and, more 
particularly, prolongation, of life beyond a certain 
term could always be called the highest good; but, 
even admitting this, we might indeed call cannibalism 
useful, for the preservation and prolongation of life, 
but we should hardly call it good. 

It is different when we come to consider the two 
other spheres of action in which we are told that any 
acts useful for the preservation and prolongation of 
life of our own offspring, and of our fellow creatures, 
should be called good. 

Here we must again distinguish. Any act for the 
benefit of our own offspring may be useful, wise, and 
prudent, and, if well conceived and carefully carried 
out, may be called good, in one sense. But not till we 
know the motive, should we call it good in the other 
sense. Ina primitive state of society children consti- 
tuted the wealth and strength of a family, and to feed 
them and keep them from danger was no more meri- 
torious than the feeding and keeping of slaves and 
cattle. From a purely utilitarian point of view, how- 
ever, it would be useful, and therefore good, not to 


MY PREDECESSORS. 105 


rear weak or crippled children, but to kill them, and 
here for the first time real goodness comes in. Real 
goodness is always, in some form or other, unselfish- 
ness. The unselfishness of a mother in bringing upa 
child that must always be a trouble and burden to her 
may be very misguided, anything but good in the eyes 
of those who interpret good as useful; but neverthe- 
less, so long as the word good exists, it has always 
been applied to such acts. 

In this case, however, the psychologist may still 
discover traces of selfishness in the natural love of a 
mother. But in the third sphere of action, in our en- 
deavor to preserve and prolong the life of our fellow 
creatures, or, more correctly, in our endeavors to pro- 
mote their general happiness, we can easily distin- 
guish between acts that ought to be called good, sim- 
ply in the sense of useful, and acts that ought to be 
called good, in the sense of unselfish. A man who 
fulfils the general duties necessary for keeping a com- 
munity together may be called a good, that is, a use- 
ful citizen. He is useful to society, but he is useful 
also to himself, as a member of that society. A man, 
however, who, like Marcus Curtius, jumped into the 
abyss in order to save Rome, may no doubt be called 
a fool by utilitarian philosophers, but the Romans 
called him good, and we too must call him unselfish. 
Anda man who, like Gordon, remained at his post, 
trusting in his God and in his country, may be called 
a madman ; but no one would dare to call him selfish, 
and posterity will keep for him a place of honor among 
the heroes, among the martyrs, among the good men 
of England. 

Philosophers are perfectly justified in attempting 
to build up systems of ethics on utilitarian and hedon- 


106 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


istic principles. We should not even contest their 
right to give a new definition of goodness, and to say 
that with them it shall mean nothing but wsefudness. 
But they must not play with language, and tell us that 
what the world meant by good was never more than 
what they mean by wsefu/. On the contrary, the word 
good was framed originally to signify acts which were 
not useful, nay, which might be detrimental to the 
agent, and which, nevertheless, require our approval. 
Their usefulness depends on the means which we em- 
ploy, goodness on the objects which we have in view. 
We may call useful what is selfish, we can never call 
what is selfish good. 

There is no sphere of mental activity which does 
not stand in need of the corrective influence of the 
Science of Thought. If soldiers must look to their 
swords, philosophers will have to look to their words. 
I know that here, as elsewhere, inquiry into the sup- 
ply, and a vigorous test of the efficiency, of words will 
be declared a nuisance, will be resisted and resented 
asaninsult. But, in spite of all that, it will come, in 
some departments of thought it has already come, 
and in the future battles of the world good swords 
and-good words will carry the day. 


INDEX. 


Abbot, The, 12. 

Abelard, 75. 

Abstract, 28. 

Agassiz, 46. 

Agni, 63, 64. 

Alphabet, roo. 
Americans, slang of, 16, 
Anfald, 12. 

Animal, man and, 2-6, 32. 
Anred, 12. 

Anthropology, 47. 
Antiquated words, 12 et seq. 
Apes, language of, 5. 
Apvzthagbh4va, 84. 
Aristotle, 82. 

Art, 102. 

Aryan languages, 23, 31, 35, 72. 
Aryas, 50, 53, 55-06. 

Asia, 56, 64. 

Astronomy, 66. 
Australian slang, 17. 
Avenant, 12. 


Bah, 26, 30. 

Bairn, 21. 

Bangster, 12. 

Bar, the root, 22, 27. 

Barbarians, 37. 

Barley, 21 et seq., 26. 

Barn, 22. 

Barrier, between man and beast, lan- 
guage a, 5, 32, 34. 

Barrow, 20 et seq. 

Barrows, funeral, 59. 

Battery, 13. 

Bear, 20-23, 27. 

Beech, 63. 

Beorh, 21. 


Bergen, 21. 

Berkeley, go. 

Bet, you, slang, 17. 

Bhar, Sanskrit root, 23, 26, 27. 

Bhratar, 4o. 

Bi-bharmi, 27. 

Bible, 11, 14. 

Bier, 20 et seq. 

Billia, L. M., g2. 

Birch, 62. 

Birth, 23, 27. 

Blood, thicker than water, 35; lan- 
guage thicker than, 40; thought 
thicker than, 43 et seq.; mixture of, 
49 et seq. 

Blumenbach, 44 et seq. 

Bopp, 67. 

Bossuet, 78. 

Bow-wow, 92 et seq. 

Brahmans, 78. 

Brat, 15. 

Buddhism, 58. 

Buffon, 46. 

Bunsen, 43. ¢ 

Burden, 20 et seq, 

Burke, 46. 


Camel, 63. 
Cannibalism, 104, 
Cassiodorus, 60. 
Caucasus, 56. 
Caxton, 12. 

Celts, 53. 

Chaucer, 16. 
Chemical analysis of words, 25 et seq. 
Chemistry, 33. 
Child-psychology, 91. 
Children, 104, 


108 


Chinese, education, 10-11; language, 
23. 

Chips of the same block, 4o. 

Clamor concomitans, 30. 

Classical languages, 37 et seq. 

Colloquia! language, 9 et seq. 

Comparative, grammar, 37; 
ogy, 33, 67 et seq., 94. 

Concepts, 29, 90, 94. 

Condillac, 76. 

Consonants, in roots, 28. 

Conversation of the soul, thought 
the, 95. 

Coral islands, 33. 

Cradle of the Aryas, 55 et seq. 

Crawford, 46. 

Cuckoo, 26, 30. 

Cuneiform inscriptions, 59. 

Curtius, Marcus, 68, 105. 

Cuvier, 45, 46. 


philol- 


Dante, 18. 

Dar, 89. 

Darius, 59, 

Darwin, 45, 74, 75, 83. 

De Bonald, 75, 77, 78 et seq. 
Definition, 100. 
Demonstrative elements, 27. 
Descartes, 79. 

Du, root, 69. 

Dialects, 9 et seq., 55, 71. 
Dice, 99. 

Dictionaries, 10, 11, 26, 71. 
Dog, 91, 92, 98. 

Dove-qailed, 19. 

Dowalad, 19. 

Dry, 17. 


Economy of language, 22, 69. 

Edda, The, 38, 61. 

Edgren, 26. 

Education, essential elements of, 66. 

Elements of words, 22 et seq., 27, 33. 

Ellis, 71. 

EUOVELY, 14. 

England and India, 41-42. 

English language, its character and 
history, 8 et seq.; its stock of words, 
8, 11 et seq., 20 et Seq. 

Ephesus, 34. 


SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE, 


Erse, 55. 

Ethnology, 44 et seq. 
Ethics, 103. 

Europe, 56 et seq. 


Faerie Queen, 14. 

Fair maids, 19. 
Familiarity, breeds contempt, 1. 
Farina, 26. 

Fenians, 53. 

Fer, root, 23, 26. 

Finnish, 68. 

Fir, 63. 

Fire, 63-64. 

Flatus vocis, 84. 

Flowers, language of, ror. 
Folk-lore, 39, 71. 

French, 53. 

Fumada, 19. 


Gaelic, 55. 

General ideas, go. 

Gentleman, ror. 

Geography, 66. 

Geology, 30, 56, 66. 

Germany, 54, 57 et seq. 

Gessler, 103. 

Gestures, 86. 

Get, slovenly use of, 17. 

Gheyn, Van den, 65. 

Goethe, 38, 92, 96. 

Good, its many meanings, 103 et seq. 

Gordon, 105. 

Gothic, 38, 39. 

Grammar, as acriterion of language, 
50. 

Grammarians of India, 25. 

Greats, 18. 

Greek language, 37, 39. 

Greeks, 38, 57, 95- 

Grimm, 68, 71. 

Gulphed, 18. 


Hair, as a criterion of race, 47, 53. 

Hale, Horatio, 17, 41, 46, 47, 48, 64. 

Fleathen, 14. 

Hebrew, not the original tongue, 37, 
69. 

Hedonism, 105, 

Hegel, 75, 96. 


INDEX. 109 


Heimskringla, 61. 
Herder, 38, 75. 

Hermann Gottfried, 38. 
Hieroglyphics, 59. 
Hindus, 40-41. 

History, 66. 

Hobbes, 75, 78. 
Flochstufe, 70. 

Hoiden, 14. 

Home rule, 102. 

Homer, 37. 

flomo sapiens, 6. 
Flousewtfe, 28. : 
Humboldt, W. von, 45, 75. 
fuzzy, 28. 


Ice, 62. 
Identity of thought and language, 73 


et seq. . 


Idiot, 13. 

Images, 88-89, go. 
Imagination, 95. 
Imp, 14. 

Imperial rule, 55. 
Lnipfen, 14. 

India, 25, 39-41. 
Indo-European, 39. 
Indus, 58, 65. 
Infixes, 27. 
Interjections, 27. 
Intermarriages, 52. 
Italy, 54. 


Jabber, 84. 

Jackdaws, ror. 

Jordanes, on the origin of the Aryas, 
€o et seq. 

Jowett, Prof., 96. 

Juggernaut, 41. . 


Kant, 4, 82, 83. 
Katharsis, ror. 
Kitchen-middens, 59. 
Knave, 13. 
Knowledge, 8. 
Kohist4n, 64. 


Lady, 102. 
Language, our familiarity with, 1; 
whence it came from and what it is 


made of, 1 etseq.; an impassable 
barrier between man and beast, 
2-6, 32-34; of parrots, 2; the begin- 
nings of, 3 et seq.: its divine or hu- 
man origin, 3 et seq.; the communi- 
cative utterances of animals not 
language, 4-5; has raised man toa 
new, intellectual plane, 6-7; knowl- 
edge of, requisite to a good educa- 
tion, 7; though amiracle, yet infin- 
itely simple, 7 et seq.; we all play 
at least one language, 8, 66; illiter- 
ate speech the beginnings of liter- 
ary speech, 9 et seq.; colloquial, 
dialectic, technical, etc., 9-10, 16- 
20; no mystery in, 11 et seq.; obso- 
lete, 12; deterioration of, 13; all 
language in its origin vulgar, 18; 
the constituent elements of, roots, 
etc., 20-23, 25-32; its parsimony, 22; 
chemical analysis of, 25 et seq.; its 
explanation ultimately amounts to 
the explanation of its roots, 28; 
roots the feeders of, 29; the light 
it throws on the origin of thought, 
30-34; the geology of language, 30; 
derived from sounds expressing 
the consciousness of repeated acts, 
30-31; roots the foundation of, 31- 
32; the simplicity of, 33; compared 
to coral islands as the outcome of 
the untold labor of millions of an- 
cestors, 33-34; the light of the 
world, 34; thicker than blood, 35, 
39-42; hypothetical primitive, 35- 
37; relationship of language and 
relationship of blood, 43 et seq.; 
linguistic classification of more 
evidential value as proving com- 
munity of descent than physiologi- 
cal classification, 44-55; it is lan- 
guage that makes man, 49; the 
very embodiment of our true selves, 
49; language as a synonym of peo- 
ples, 51; asameans of historical 
research, 62 et seq.; the secrets of, 
betrayed by Sanskrit, 70; the work 
to be done in, 71; genealogical 
table of the Aryan family of, 72; 
identity of thought and, 73 et seq.; 
and thought, two faces of the same 


IIO 


head, 94; Plato on, 95; defined, 97 
et seq., 100 et seq.; purification of, 
100; of flowers, etc., ror. See also 
the headings Language, Sctence of, 
Words, Roots, and the adjectives 
English, Aryan, etc. 

Language, Science of, its place in 
education, 6, 66; its simple but sig- 
nificant lessons, 8, 32 et seq., 34-42; 
the results of its inquiry, 27; has 
encouraged national aspirations, 
37, 54-55; has enlarged our histori- 
cal horizon, 39; its bearing on phi- 
losophy, 75, 76, 86; shows the iden- 
tity of words and concepts, 93 et 
seq. 

Lamarck, 75. 

Latham, 59 et seq. 

Latin, 37. 

Lavater, 96. 

Linnzus, 46. 

Lion, 63. 

Literary standard, 9 et seq. 

Little go, 18. 

Littré, 71. 

Locke, 82, 90-91, 94. 

Logos, 74, 85, 95 et seq. 

Luck, 11. 

Lucretius, 75. 


Maids, Fair, 19. 

Maistre, De, 75, 78, 79 et seq. 
Man, descent of, 2-6, 32-33. 
Manchester, school of, 68 et seq. 
Mansel, 75. 

Mar, 30. 

Mare’s nest, 75. 

Matar, 4o. 

Mathematics, 99. 

Media, 57. , 
Mental activity, 97 et seq. 
Micklosich, 68. 

Mill, J. Stuart, 80. 

Miracle, language a, 7. 
Moderations, 18. 

Moo, 26, 30. 

Morris, 71. 

Morton, 46. 

Motherly love, 105. 

Miller, Friedrich, 46-48. 
Miller, Otfried, 38, 


SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


Mystery, in language, no, 11 et seq. 
Mythology, 38, 39. 


Names, 98. 
Nationalities, 54. 
Nebuchadnezzar, 51, 53. 
Nesctus, 15. 

Newton, 79, 92. 
Nibelunge, The, 38. 
Nice, 15. 

Nigger, 41. 

Noiré, 86. 

Nominalism, 76, 94 et seq. 
Nursery psychology, 91. 


Oak, 63, 93. 
Odin, 61. 


Officina gentium, 60. 


Oken, 75, 92. 
Onomatopeeia, 26. 
Opinion, 95. 

Orosius, 60. 

Oxford Dictionary, Io, 71. 
Oxus, 56, 65. 


Pagan, 4, 

Pamir, 56, 62. 

PAzini, 25. ~ 

Panjab, 57. 

Parliamentary English, 9-10. 

Parrots, language of, 2-3, 101. 

Particular ideas, go. 

People, language a synonym of, 51. 

Percept, 28. 

Persia, 57. 

Peschel, Oscar, 46-47. 

dep, root, 23. 

Philology and ethnology, 44 et seq.; 
comparative, 27, 33, 67, 94. 

Philosophy, 66, 74 et seq., 97, 99. 

Physiological classifications, 9 et seq. 

Pickering, 46. 

Pigeon-holes, 100, 

Planets, 88. 

Plato, 95, 96. 

Ploughed, 18. 

Population of the earth, 52. 

Pott, 67. 

Powell, Major, 47. 

Prefixes, 27. 


INDEX. 


Prichard, 45, 46. 
Primary words, 20. 
Proto-Aryan, 23, 35. 
TpaTov wevdoc, 84. 
Proverbs, 14. 


Races of man, 44 et seq. 

Realism, 76. 

Reason, 97 et seq. 

Religion, 66. 

Repetition of acts, leads to the origin 
of common concepts, 29 et seq. 

Robert of Gloucester,. 15. 

Romanes, G. J., 3, 4, 5+ 

Romans, 38, 105. 

Rook, Sir George, 13, 

Roots, 20, 23, 25 et seq., 28 et seq., 31 
et seq., 86. 

Rosmini, 75. 

Rousseau, 77. 


Sanskrit, 23, 25, 26, 39, 40-43, 67-72, 
78, 86, 

Sayce, 65. 

Selfishness, 105. 

Semitic languages, 31. 

Sepoys, and the English, 51, 

Seven Rivers, the land of, 57. 

Scancia, 60 et seq. 

Scandinavia, 57 et seq. 

Schelling, 75. 

Scherer, 71. 

Schleiermacher, 75. 

Science of Language, The, cited, 88, 94. 

Science of Thought, The, cited, 26, 73, 
75, 76, 90, 94, 96, 97- 

Scientific terms, 19. 

Shinar, 102. 

Shakespeare, words in, 11, 16, 

Simplicity, 14. 

Skeat, 11, 26, 71. 

Skin, as a criterion of race, 47, 52. 

Skull. as a criterion of race, 47, 53. 

Slang, 10, 16, 17. 

Slaves, 53. 

Slavonic languages, 36. 

Slide, slang word, 16, 

Snow, 62. c 

Spenser, 14. 

SZ, 30. 


CHE 


Star, 87. 

Statesmanship, 55. 

Stewart, Dugald, 78. 

Strew, 87. 

Suffixes, 23, 27. 

Suttee, 41. 

Sweden, 58 et seq. 

Sweet, 71. 

Swift, 13. 

Swords, soldiers must look to their, 
106. 

Symbolism, intellectual, 5. 


Taine, 75, 80, 91, 92 et seq. 

Tan, 30. 

Tear, 89. 

Technical terms, 19. 

Tell, William, 103. 

tépoeobat, 17. 

Termination, 27. 

Teutonic languages, 36. 

Thales, 82. 

Theodoric, 60. 

Thinking aloud, 85. 

Thirsty, 17. 

Thought, defined, 96 et seq.; identity 
of language and, 73 et seq.; Science 
of, its corrective influences, 106; 
thicker than blood, 43 et seq. 

Thuggee, 41. 

Tiefstufe, 70. 

Tiger, 63. 

Timbre, 84. 

Times, The, 68. 

Tongues, confusion of, 102. 

Torrere, 17. 

Tree, 63, 88, 89, 92, 98. 

Turanian, 43 et seq. 


Udiatta, 70. 
Uinen, 59. 

Ujfalvy, 64. 

Ullage, 18. 
Undines, 84. 
Unselfishness, 105. 
Utilitarianism, 104. 


Vedic, age, religion, etc., 57 et seq.; 
language, 70. 
Villain, 13. 


112 SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 


Vincent, Bory de St., 46. etc., 10-11; the adventures of, 19, 

Virgil, 37. 63; their analysis into roots, 25 et 

Volgare, Il, 18. seq.; their importance, 97 et seq.; 

Vowels, 69 et seq. philosophers must look to their, 
106. 

Welcker, 38. World, 28. 

Welsh, 55, 

Weor, 28. Yavan, or Yauna, 58. 

Whately, 75. Yaxartes, 56, 65. 

Winter, 62. Yo heo, 30. 


Words, number of, used in common 
life, in Shakespeare, the Bible, Zeuss, 68, 


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